In the spring of 2005, then-president Jack Fowler of the then-Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making (FIMDM) approached me looking for ideas. He wanted to bring ideas to his Board about how to reach the broader patient population beyond those that FIMDM was reaching with its condition-specific shared decision-making programs (which I had helped produce throughout the ’90s as an employee of FIMDM based at Dartmouth Medical School).
I immediately told him how much I admired a fledgling Media Doctor website in Australia, which was systematically reviewing health care news coverage in that country. I thought the FIMDM mission of improving patient decision-making and the Media Doctor mission of improving media messages about health care intersected. Fowler got the picture immediately, sold his Board on the idea, and granted me the first of 8 years of funding.
After a year of planning and building the team of reviewers and the website, we launched HealthNewsReview.org on April 17, 2006.
I have always been blessed by having a terrific team of contributors – about 70 different people at one time or another. But four have been with me during the entire time: Harold DeMonaco, and Drs. Steve Atlas, Karen Carlson and Kathleen Fairfield.
I wanted you to be able to hear from all four in this 10th anniversary podcast. It is the industry-independent expertise of people like this that gave our project immediate street cred 10 years ago, with a reputation that has grown ever since.
Some stats and historical notes:
In a talk I gave last week, I used this slide to try to explain why we’ve stuck with this for 10 years.
Thanks to The National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation for providing us with a grant to produce these podcasts.
Credit: podcast editor Cristeta Boarini
Music credit:
Please note: if you have listened to any of our podcasts and like what you’ve heard, we’d appreciate it if you’d leave a Review and a Rating on the iTunes webpage where our podcasts can be found: https://itun.es/i6S86Qw. (You need to click on the “View in iTunes” button on the left of that page, then find the Ratings and Reviews tab.)
You can now subscribe to our podcasts on that iTunes page or via this RSS feed: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:167780656/sounds.rss
All episodes of our podcasts are archived on this page on HealthNewsReview.org.
Comments (1)
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Kathlyn Stone
April 13, 2016 at 9:53 amCongrats Gary and Harry, Kathleen, Steve and Karen! Medical news guides and muckrakers rock. Thanks for your perseverance.
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