17 May 2012 07:01


Meet our staff

Linda Davidson

Linda is a co-founder of eHealth Media and one of its directors. An editor and writer with 20 years experience of the healthcare sector, Linda is a former editor of Nursing Times (1988-92) and editorial director of Macmillan Publishers’ health magazines, now Emap Healthcare (1992-8). She holds an MBA from the University of Warwick Business School.

Jon Hoeksma

Jon is a co-founder of eHealth Media and editor of eHealth Insider. An editor and journalist with 10 years experience of the healthcare sector, Jon is a former editor of Health Manager Today who has reported on health IT issues for a variety of publications. Before entering journalism, he was an NHS graduate trainee working in Southampton, chiefly in primary care. He graduated from the University of Warwick in 1991.

Fiona Barr

An editor and journalist with almost 25 years’ experience of the health sector, Fiona trained as a journalist with the Westminster Press local newspaper group and later edited Medeconomics, Fundholding and Mims Magazine. Fiona was also the launch editor of Haymarket Medical’s first online site GPOnline and its internet and computing title GPNet. She has been the editor of EHI Primary Care since its launch in February 2005.

Jay Bhatt

Jay graduated in 2009 from Queen Mary, University of London with a 2:1 in History and Politics. Since graduating, he has worked as a research officer in the Department for Work and Pensions, and has delivered bespoke research services for small companies and charities. He is now working as a researcher in the EHI Intelligence team, where he is responsible for the quality of the market leading NHS Trust Database.

Lindsey Birnsteel

Lindsey joined eHealth Media in February 2007 and is head of technology and research. She holds an MSc (with distinction) in Information Systems Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where her thesis focused on e-health trends and healthcare information technology issues. She is also a professional member of the British Computer Society.

Jamie Buchanan

Senior analyst Jamie Buchanan joined eHealth Insider after working on market intelligence projects for American Express and Citigroup. He previously worked as an analyst for a competitive intelligence consultancy for FTSE 100 IT and media clients, including BT, Vodafone and Microsoft. He started his career research and developing IT projects for a leading health charity.

Dave Carter

Passionate, brilliant, dynamic, an agile maverick dedicated to enhancing professional performance every single day. Extremely adept at both copying and pasting, the UK’s leading online producer hopes one day to learn the keyboard shortcuts to enable him to achieve an even greater work output.

Mark Folkard

Web developer. Terse. If you seek his monument, look around you.

Neil Hadland

Neil joined eHealth Media in January 2009 to oversee eHealth Insider’s expansion from online activity to live events. With more than 14 years of sales and events experience with EMAP, Richmond Events and UBM, his role has since expanded to oversee the commercial side of the company. He now leads the sales team in creating bespoke packages for clients across the entire EHI portfolio.

James Ingram

James is an account manager with four years’ experience working in online advertising sales and events. He began his career at Haymarket on business to business titles such as Third Sector. James is educated in media and marketing with a BA (Hons) from Hull University.

Paul Smith

Paul joined eHealth Insider in 2010 to set up and lead its consulting team. This delivers bespoke projects for clients in both the NHS and vendor communities. Paul has had a 25 year career in providing information on which decisions are made. He had a ten year stint at Which? magazine - where he was head of product research and responsible for reports on everything from washing machines to cars. He then moved to Kable - a research consultancy focused on public sector technology markets. As MD, he sold the business to Guardian News and Media and became head of publishing for the Guardian’s B2B business, Guardian Professional, where he was responsible for devising and implementing a digital engagement strategy.

Chris Thorne

Chris joined the eHealth Insider team in February 2012 as a reporter covering the North, Midlands and East region. He recently completed an MA (with distinction) in Journalism from Brunel University.

Rebecca Todd

Rebecca is a specialist health reporter. She joined the eHealth Insider team in October 2011 after working at a daily newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand since early 2007.

She has a keen interest in primary care issues and covers this area for EHI.

Lyn Whitfield

Lyn joined eHealth Media as managing editor in 2008, after several years as a freelance journalist, editor and project manager working for both newspapers and magazines and think-tanks. She is another LSE graduate, holding an MSc (with distinction) in Public Policy and Planning.


About Us

EHealth Insider started life on 13 December 2001, when the first newsletter opened with the mission statement: “In every part of healthcare, information technology is changing the way managers and clinical staff work, the way services are delivered and how health consumers think and behave.

“eHealth Media’s central purpose is to explain these changes to business, professional and consumer audiences, and help healthcare organisations to realise the full potential of electronic communications.”

Growing interest

The newsletter caught the tide of interest generated by the New Labour government’s decision to invest in healthcare IT. The tide was given force by a speech by Sir John Pattison, the Department of Health’s director of R&D, at the 2002 Healthcare Computing show.

In his landmark speech, Sir John announced a new national programme, based on infrastructure, electronic records, booked admissions and e-prescribing. It set in motion the foundation of the National Programme for IT in the NHS and later the creation of the IT agency, NHS Connecting for Health.

The newsletter gathered a devoted audience of about 2,000 and eHealth Media founders, Jon Hoeksma and Linda Davidson, decided to change the company website to reflect the growing enthusiasm for eHealth Insider and to publish advertising from commercial supporters.

The first series of advertisements came from Siemens, promoting its Soarian system. Others followed and most have stayed. Early advertisers such as First DataBank, iSoft, Emis, TPP and InterSystems remain valued clients today.

EHealth Insider’s coverage of the new national programme attracted huge interest. On a couple of occasions, the sheer weight of traffic made the site crash; and most of the company’s early revenues were spent on technology to make it more stable.

2003 marked the start of real growth and the appointment of EHI’s first staff, apart from the founders. By the end of the year the site had over 6,000 registered users.

Launches and development

GPs have always been in the lead on the use of IT in UK healthcare, and this was reflected in the company’s first development, eHealth Insider Primary Care, in January 2004.

Later that year, EHI Jobs launched and quickly became the new place for recruitment in healthcare IT. The weekly EHI Jobs newsletter is now followed by about 8,000 registered job seekers.

Awards were the next venture to follow in 2007. These were made possible by the generous principal sponsor, BT, and numerous others including Quicksilva - who deserve a special mention for having sponsored a category every year from the awards’ start.

Healthcare Interoperability, a one-day show in Birmingham in October 2008, launched eHealth Insider’s venture in conferences and exhibitions. It was followed in 2009 by eHealth Insider Live, a two-day event which attracted nearly 1,000 visitors and over 80 exhibitors and sponsors.

2009-10 also saw the start of much greater use of video on the eHealth Insider site, with video diaries chronicling the thoughts of healthcare IT people out on the front line and a weekly feature, EHI TV, offering a video summary of the week’s news or interviews with leaders in healthcare IT.




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