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 ten 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.
Charlie Beall
Having previously worked on titles such as Computing, Financial Director, BusinessGreen.com, Accountancy Age, The Marketer, People Management, FM World and Public Finance, Charlie brings with him a wealth of B2B publishing experience. Charlie's background is in marketing. He now looks after the commercial development of EHI's publishing products.
Lindsay Bell
Lindsay joined the EHI Intelligence team as a market researcher in 2011 following a research assistant post on a clinical study at St Thomas’s Hospital. She studied for her Psychology degree in the USA and then completed an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London.
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.
Lis Evenstad
Reporter. Lis joined the eHealth Insider team in October 2012 covering the North, Midlands and East region. She recently completed a degree in BA Journalism at City University London.
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.
Lauren Hoodless
Lauren is the northern one in the company; having previously lived and worked in Sheffield. Lauren has four years’ experience of working in events and joined EHealth Media in July 2011 as event executive. She works alongside Neil Hadland organising EHI Live, the EHI Awards, and new events as the company continues to grow.
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.
Tamsyn Mason
Tamsyn joined eHealth Insider in September 2011 as senior sales executive, to sell across its entire portfolio of products, including advertising and events. Tamsyn has worked in media sales for six years, specialising in recruitment advertising - her last role was at a pharmaceutical publisher. Tamsyn is now focusing solely on event sales and sponsorship opportunities for EHI Live, the EHI Awards, and the Information for Commissioning show, as well as any other bespoke events produced by EHI. Tamsyn is also retaining her recruitment knowledge by looking after EHI Jobs.
SA Mathieson
Senior analyst SA Mathieson joined eHealth Insider in December 2012. He has researched and written about healthcare IT for more than a decade, firstly as a freelance writer for titles including Health Service Journal and the Guardian, then as news editor of Government Computing and founding editor of the Guardian Healthcare Professional Network. Before joining EHI Intelligence he worked as a senior healthcare analyst for Kable. He also blogs, tweets @samathieson and writes articles about healthcare and other topics.
Dan Read
Dan joined in March 2012 from a media monitoring background and has used his experience in selling research to good effect in leading the sales effort for EHI Intelligence and his consultative approach and industry knowledge has now been applied EHI Engage.
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.
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. A year later, Rebecca was promoted to news editor, and now looks after EHI’s news on a day to day basis. She also has a keen interest in primary care issues and covers this area for eHealth Insider.
Josephine Weir
Josephine joined the company in 2011 as the co-ordinator of the EHI CCIO Campaign, a role that has now developed into marketing executive. While the campaign and the CCIO Leaders Network that was set up to built on its success will always be her babies, she enjoys the challenge and excitement that comes from being involved in all aspects of EHealth Media’s business, and the growing number of events it now runs.
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 an LSE graduate, holding an MSc (with distinction) in Public Policy and Planning.
EHealth Insider is the leading source of news, comment and analysis about healthcare IT in the UK. It runs an industry-leading portal, publishes newsletters and special reports, brings the e-health community together at EHI Live in Birmingham, and celebrates its successes at the annual EHI Awards in association with BT.
EHI is completely independent and owned by its founders, Linda Davidson and Jon Hoeksma. It was set up as a newsletter in 2001 and has grown, as a business, to include a research arm – EHI Intelligence – and the CCIO Leaders Network to promote clinical involvement in IT and information projects.
EHI has a wide audience of readers with an interest in healthcare IT, including senior managers within trusts and commissioning organisations, NHS IT directors and their staff, people working for UK healthcare IT suppliers, hospital clinicians, GPs, academics, and interested patients.
EHealth Insider started life on 13 December 2001, when it published its first newsletter. This 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.”
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 (now CSC), 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.
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, which still backs them today.
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, and in 2010 by EHI Live.
This continually expanding show is now firmly established as the event in UK healthcare IT, and runs annually at the NEC in Birmingham every November.
2010 also saw the launch of EHI’s research arm, EHI Intelligence. It maintains the EHI Intelligence NHS Trust Database, a validated database of all the major systems in use at acute trusts, which drives the analysis in its growing range of reports.
In 2011, EHI stepped out in a new direction again, with the EHI CCIO Campaign to encourage every NHS organisation to consider appointing a chief clinical information officer to lead on IT and information projects.
The campaign was a huge success, and led to the creation of the EHI CCIO Leaders Network to support the CCIOs in place and to encourage more to be appointed.
2012 saw a new focus on commissioning and the launch of a new, dedicated news service - EHI Imaging Informatics, as well as the launch of EHI Engage, a library of white papers, thought leadership pieces and case studies that suppliers can promote to EHI readers in sophisticated ways.
The national programme never delivered what was promised for it; at least as far as acute trusts were concerned. The coalition government that came to power in 2010 has abolished it not once, but twice.
Through all these trials and tribulations, EHI has continued to report on, analyse and support all aspects of UK healthcare IT. Its main newsletter is now sent to well over 25,000 subscribers, and EHI Live 2012 welcomed almost 2,000 conference delegates and exhibition visitors through its doors.
EHI will continue to report on the unfinished business of the national programme, on the choices that NHS trusts increasingly make about their own IT, and on the rapidly changing world of mobile health, apps and other innovations in the years to come.
