At MS&L Washington, we sell mostly messages. Our clients range from nonprofits to trade associations to corporations that need help on Capitol Hill. This year, we jumped into issues blogging, on behalf of our largest client, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). MS&L’s RWJF team helps shape the content of the Foundation’s new blog, The User’s Guide to the Health Reform Galaxy, which enlists policy experts to discuss health care reform. The DC office has also helped place the blog in Health Wonk Review several times.
Health Wonk Review is a biweekly compendium of the best of the health policy blogs. Health policy, infrastructure, insurance, technology and managed care bloggers participate as reviewers, with each issue hosted on a different participant’s blog. For readers, it’s a way to sample some of the latest thinking and the “best of the best.” Samples of RWJF coverage includes reviews by MedicaidFirstAid, Healthcare Technology News and the Health Business Blog.
The team was also able to secure a post on the RWJF blog for another client, the Premier healthcare alliance. The post by Premier’s CEO prompted the New America Foundation, a major DC think tank and target audience for the alliance, to do its own post about Premier’s hospital safety improvement program.
For the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, a RWJF grantee that documents variations in how medical resources are distributed and used in the U.S., MS&L Washington has successfully placed a branded, interactive online map on media web sites across the country. The map illustrates how Medicare spending varies widely across the country, breaking down Medicare reimbursements by state and region. It shows, for example, that Medicare spends nearly three times more in Miami than it does in Honolulu. To date, the map has been featured on Kaiser Health News, U.S. News & World Report and MSNBC, and NPR used the original map to create its own version highlighting Dartmouth Atlas data on medical procedures.
- Eva Fowler, Senior Account Executive in Washington, D.C.
