Think broadly about health care stories to explore pending changes

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Reporters across the country keep finding great angles to explore the pending health care changes. Anna Gorman of the Los Angeles Times is among them.

She writes that, despite a shortage of primary care doctors, some doctors are switching to “concierge medicine” to reduce their patient loads and hours. Anna writes that in exchange for fees ranging from $1,500 to $2,500, patients get more access to their doctors and on-time appointments. One doctor in the story says he hopes to reduce his patient load from 2,000 to 400.

In time-starved newsrooms, this could have simply been a story about the latest trend. But Anna does a great job of balancing the story with the broader implications of what this means as more people get healthcare coverage.

A PR pitch led Anna to the story – not the usual way she gets stories, she says. She searched medical journals to find more information and contacted other companies that work with concierge doctors to balance the story.

“You have to do your homework and be persistent enough to find voices on the other side,” she says. “It may not be the most obvious place to find opposition.”

Anna Gorman

Even if the material doesn’t make it into the story, she says it gives her an additional point of view to help her write with authority. Her clear understanding of the issue is apparent in a video interview she did discussing the story. (You see it at the top of her story.)

Two other things occurred to me in writing this post. One is that reporters can search for different health care angles by checking in with state medical societies. They’ll know about trends in your area.

Another is a recent Muck Rack post I saw about PR pitches. It offers some funny tweets about bad pitches reporters have received. It also acknowledges that not all PR people are guilty of bad pitches.