How to Maximize Your Health IT Pitch? Ask a Pro...

The healthcare IT industry is continuing to rapidly evolve on a near daily basis. National technology initiatives are brought to a screeching halt, policy reforms are revoked and legislation aimed at easing IT adoption are just about as commonly found in the news headlines as a story on Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend. So what does this mean from a PR and reporting standpoint?

Believe it or not, what’s old is still new what it comes to healthcare IT reporting. For example, the story of electronic health record adoption and usability challenges has been told time after time (after time, after time….), but the truth of the matter is that the topic still resonates with readers. Throw in some anecdotes around new ways to optimize your EHR – think data analytics, system interoperability and standardization – and you’ve got enough news angles to last you a lifetime.

But not all healthcare IT topics are created equal. To help clear the  smoke on what healthcare IT reporters really want from a PR pitch, we connected with three of the industry’s leading reporters on what they’re looking for (and what they aren’t looking for) when it comes to maximizing your media outreach:

- Ed Burns, Senior News Writer, TechTarget on the topic of analytics:

“Well my site is strictly focused on analytics; Within analytics, customer interviews would probably be the only thing I would take.”

- Joseph Goedert, News Editor, Health Data Management also discuss the value of lessons learned from end-users:

“What reporters want is to know what the real news is and to talk with a user about their experiences--including what went well and what didn't go so well--to inform their peers about how best to optimize the technology. Every new contract with a vendor, every new implementation, carries lessons for peers to know about, and that's what we want to talk about.”

Simply put, nothing is more compelling for healthcare IT reporters than having a customer who can speak to the exact challenges and successes they experienced first-hand when implementing or using a new technology. And – regardless of how many ways the cookie can crumble (or in this case, how many ways the EHR implementation can crumble) – the way to a healthcare journalist's heart is to connect him or her with someone who has experienced the technologies first-hand.