HealthContentAdvisors

Health Content08 Review

• Posted November 18th 2008
• by Janice

Our theme for Health Content08 was Incumbents, Innovators, and Intermediaries. The conference demonstrated through programming, presentations and executive panel discussions how IT and the movement toward consumer-directed healthcare are forever changing the way healthcare publishers produce and deliver information to patients, medical professionals, and healthcare payers and administrators. 

At Health Content08, we brought together CEOs and strategists from  leading consumer health media companies and professional medical publishing companies in our morning panels to offer, in the words of one of the panelists, a view of “industry-specific trends in the context of our respective strategies“.  These morning panels, and the keynote by West Shell III, Chairman and CEO of Healthline Networks, were highlights of the event. 

The afternoon sessions explored our main themes in more detail through case study presentations.  EBSCO Publishing, HealthGrades, Staywell Consumer Health, Advanstar Communications, BenefitFocus Media, Trigram America, and Consumer Reports all offered insight into how they are transforming their information into interactive information tools and livening up their content with video, audio, and integration into customers’ workflow.  We closed the program with a look at how personalized medicine will affect the production and consumption of health care information.

Wednesday afternoon’s Innovators Showcase proved to be a huge success.  Eleven early stage health content companies took the stage and wowed our audience with their new approaches to helping consumers and professionals solve their information needs. 

Once again, I would like to thank our superb speakers. One attendee went out of his way to tell me that he learned something in every session.   We will have to work hard to outshine the quality of the panelists and presenters from this year’s event.  It was our goal to provide the audience a better understanding of the connection between consumer and professional healthcare publishing and based on feedback from the audience-and speakers-we succeeded. 

We will draw on the examples from Health Content08 in future posts to this e-newsletter.  For those of you who attended Health Content08, thank you. It was a pleasure to meet all of you.  For those of you who missed the event this year, we hope to see you at the next Health Content conference.  ICYOU.com will have some videos from the event to share with everyone very soon.

We start planning for our next event immediately and will continue to report on notable developments in health content in our Health Content in Perspective blog/e-newsletter.  We welcome feedback on the conference and would be delighted to hear from potential speakers and ideas for next year’s program.