Designing the new Modern Healthcare

Like healthcare itself, journalism written for and about healthcare's leaders is undergoing dramatic change. Today's busy executives need easy-to-digest, actionable information that helps them understand, respond to and lead the transformation of the healthcare delivery system that is now underway.

That's why you hold in your hands a substantially improved Modern Healthcare. Every new and continuing element of the redesigned magazine—the flagship of the Modern Healthcare brand—has been conceived with you, the readers, in mind. Many new features have been added.

Every day, top industry executives tell our reporters that the gusher of changes—from payment reform; from delivery system reform; from the insurance coverage expansion; and from patient expectations and demands—is the most sweeping they've ever seen. The financial pressures have never been more intense. We report those stories every day—both on our online news website, ModernHealthcare.com, and in our weekly magazine.

For us to remain the most reliable source, we must continue to offer a comprehensive report on the latest healthcare business news. Our website and e-mail newsletters will increasingly become the place you need to go for that information. No print publication can compete with the immediacy of the Web on breaking news, nor should it try.

What this magazine becomes with this redesign—and what you told us you wanted in our survey of some 400 readers—is the place you can go for thoughtful analysis of that news. And it will be the place you will first find investigative reports that break new ground. For an example, read this issue's cover story by reporter Joe Carlson on how sometimes there is a disconnect between cost and quality, using cardiovascular intervention as an example.

The expanded feature section will continue to be the place where you can go to read longer stories and special reports that provide insight into how you can do your jobs better and lead your organizations through these momentous times. Stories will be punctuated with easy-to-read boxes that provide busy readers with the strategies they can pursue to get results. For a good example, check out this week's feature on ICD-10 conversion.

Institutions lead by example. So do people. That's why we've added two new features to the mix.

First is a biweekly Best Practices story that will highlight an institution that recognized it had a problem, developed a strategy to solve that problem (or at least improve the situation), and pursued that strategy to a successful result. The second will be a regular question-and-answer session by Modern Healthcare reporters and editors with leaders of important healthcare institutions. We are proud to kick off what we think will be an extremely popular feature with an eye-opening interview with Bernard Tyson, the new CEO of Kaiser Permanente, the largest integrated delivery system in the country.

We've also added a fact-filled page called Data Points that will provide important and interesting information in easily digestible bites culled from a variety of authoritative sources. Some will educate; others will entertain; all will be chosen with the goal of being relevant to your work—the paying and providing of healthcare to more than 300 million Americans.

We are packaging our main news section in new and more usable ways. We've added The Week Ahead to foreshadow key events during the upcoming week. We will continue to run Late News and Regional News stories that meet a high bar on relevance.

While our main news section will continue to convey the most significant stories from the past week, our reporters will not be offering backward-looking reports. For a print publication to remain relevant in the 21st century, its reporters must analyze the meaning of the news for the wide range of healthcare leaders who make up our readership.

The redesigned magazine you hold in your hands is just one part of Modern Healthcare's ongoing strategy for remaining the most trusted source of business news and information in healthcare. Next year, we will be redesigning our website. And our expanded research department will be revamping many of our surveys to generate better information in our popular By the Numbers feature.

We hope you enjoy your redesigned magazine. Drop us a line at [email protected] and let us know what you think.

Follow Merrill Goozner on Twitter: @MHgoozner