The curtain goes up

We wish all our readers a happy, productive and prosperous 2012. As we ring in the New Year, we also usher in a new look, along with a new approach to news reporting. The idea is for Healthcare IT News to more closely reflect the excitement and challenges in the healthcare IT sector today.

Welcome change

The healthcare IT scene has changed radically since the first issue of Healthcare IT News hit your desks in December 2003 and President George W. Bush mentioned electronic medical records in his State of the Union address in January 2004. It may have been a passing reference, but his words injected the industry with a high-octane energy – and great hopes that the promise of IT would be realized at last.

Fast-forward to Feb. 17, 2009 and a new administration at work on healthcare reform. The HITECH Act is signed into law, pumping millions of dollars into the economy – all targeted at moving the healthcare system into modern day. Beacon communities, RECs, meaningful use, EHR incentives and ACOs become part of our working vocabulary and the focus of our stories, also innovation, open source, apps, Direct, transparency and value-based, to name a few more.

Throughout it all Healthcare IT News adhered to the framework conceived for its 2003 launch. With 2012,we are infusing Healthcare IT News with more of the energy and urgency that is part of your everyday life at work. We’re picking up the pace. And, more than ever, we are tightening the focus on what is meaningful and valuable. We’re also injecting more pizzazz. Pizzazz may not be part of the healthcare IT lexicon, but it certainly is innate to your work. You can’t deny the wow factor in saving lives, or helping patients overcome chronic illness.

The healthcare IT industry has become more connected, more vibrant, more urgent, more innovative, and more personal. As the publication of choice for the majority of healthcare IT professionals, Healthcare IT News is doing the same.

Bigger, better photos will draw you into our stories. You’ll notice more charts and graphs – the better to inform at a glance. We’ve changed our typefaces, and we’ve changed the way we organize things – by topic, instead of by where you work, in a hospital, physician practice or for a payer or vendor. Instead, you’ll see pages devoted to policy, clinical, business and data – subjects that are of interest to you regardless of where you work.

We know meaningful change is more than skin deep. As reporters, we will dig deeper, provide more telling detail, and seek more points of view. We’ll do more reporting from the scene in 2012. It might mean sailing up the Maine Coast to document for you the successes and challenges of the Maine Seacoast Mission’s telehealth program or checking on Watson’s progress at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, or the UPMC project with Nuance in Pittsburgh.

We’re taking on the challenge of digging deeper and providing more meaningful detail. We want to surprise you, tell you something you don’t know. Our stories might make you angry or annoyed, inspire you, or amuse you. And, we’re getting more personal with profiles and interviews with you and your colleagues – you, the people who make IT work. We plan to connect the faces to the technology. We’ll also make meaningful connections for you from Healthcare IT News in print to our online material with callouts to relevant online content.

Like you, we are committed to excellence, to service, to connectedness and to value. Get in touch with us. Call, email, write, Tweet. Tell us what’s on your mind. Share your successes and your challenges. Brag about how you solved the seemingly unsolvable. Other readers will be grateful. Let us know how you keep connected and do meaningful work. We suspect it’s more than with just a small pinch of panache.