Lee DeOrio, editor of For The Record

What are the primary sources of information for your magazine? What are readers interested in most?

In my view, the contacts made in the industry are invaluable as a source of information. We get a lot of e-mails from healthcare professionals about the latest news in their respective area and we receive some material from technology providers about their latest software updates. Of course, visiting the major trade shows is important but we also do quite a lot of research before publishing articles in the magazine. Our readership includes healthcare IT professionals, coding specialists and medical transcriptionists, each with their own special interests. We also reach out to CFOs and other hospital decision-makers. For health information administrators and technicians, case studies about implementing new technology are most interesting, but they are also keen to find out about upcoming issues. Coders, on the other hand, are looking for information about the ever-changing rules and regulations. Transcriptionists and transcription firms want to know more about the current off-shore trends, with working overseas such a major issue for them at the moment.

Your magazine provides health information professionals with writer’s guidelines for submitting their own articles. To what extent do your readers make use of this opportunity?

Some time ago, every fourth article would come from external writers in the healthcare arena. More recently, we have drastically reduced that number. Now 90% of all articles are written by our own editorial team. Although we still receive a lot of input from outside, we find that many articles are very biased, taking the reader in one direction only. We look for information that is interesting to our readers and strictly avoid publishing stories that amount to nothing more than a sales pitch. Articles from the industry, from a hospital or a transcription firm should focus on how they implemented the technology, not on a particular product. On the other hand, we are keen to publish case studies. Feedback shows that our readers really love to read stories about the successful application of technology in real-life scenarios.

What other kinds of story do you accept apart from case studies?

We always welcome articles that address areas specific issues, such as the adoption of personal health records. If someone were to write an article giving ten reasons why it’s vital that the industry adopt electronic medical records, we would probably publish it. In coding, we would be happy to read about a professional’s view of speech recognition, one of the hot topics at the moment, and in healthcare IT e-prescribing is reaching everyone’s radar, so we’d welcome an opinion on that trend. All of these contributions are usually published in our department sections - we don’t publish them as feature articles. This area is restricted to articles from our editorial team which present useful information in an unbiased way.(AG)

Contact Lee DeOrio at ldeorio@gvpub.com