Linda Davidson, editor and co-founder of E-Health Insider

When you launched E-Health Insider seven years ago, what were the reasons behind introducing an online magazine?

Jon Hoeksma and I launched E-Health Insider as an online magazine in 2001. Both of us come from the hard copy printing industry and we regarded online publishing as a new trend which would be disruptive to the publishing industry. Launching an online magazine without the need for printing or shipping and the opportunities of fast interaction with readers intrigued us. Besides, we felt that healthcare IT specialists were not particularly well served by UK media at the time. Healthcare technology is changing rapidly; the UK government is committed to NHS modernisation on an unprecedented scale and IT will play a major role in this transformation. Senior managers and practitioners in healthcare IT need reliable and up-to-date information to keep up with the latest trends. For healthcare IT professionals, an online magazine is a natural medium as they are very comfortable using the Internet. When we launched the magazine, we started with a very small contact database but the magazine grew as you would expect with an online initiative: content drives community. Readers liked the newsletter and would pass it on to their colleagues, subscriptions rose and the supplier industry began to advertise with us.

What role do healthcare technology providers play in terms of the editorial content of your magazine?

Suppliers provide us with a lot of product information and we use their information as a basis for many of our stories. As we are a business-to-business magazine, suppliers naturally possess a lot of the information that is extremely interesting to our readers. There is a lot of two-way traffic between our community and the supplier industry. We see them as a very important part of the community.

How can healthcare IT providers and other professionals contribute to E-Health Insider?

We welcome contributions from the industry and related organizations, especially comments and analysis articles. We focus on healthcare technology, the UK policy environment in which the NHS and its IT partners operate and the benefits technology can bring for patients and the public. Contributions in these areas are always welcome. Our readers can also contribute by posting comments about an article on our website. All online comments are monitored, which means that someone from our staff has to actually approve an online comment before it will be published on the website. We are now also looking into the use of forums to further the exchange of healthcare professionals in the UK and in other European countries. In the last few months, we have also established an additional weekly newsletter, E-Health Europe, which covers e-health trends from all over Europe.(AG)

Contact Linda Davidson at linda@e-health-media.com