Kaiser Foundation Broadcasts Health-Policy Debates – Even the Boring Ones

By NICOLE WALLACE

Drew Altman, president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, doesn’t

necessarily recommend his foundation’s Webcasts to people who are looking for an alternative to summer reruns.

“We broadcast events that are so boring that no one else will broadcast them,” he says jokingly.

So while Kaiser probably isn’t going to give Survivor a run for its money, the Menlo Park, Calif., foundation is trying to use Webcast technology to provide information to its small but influential audience of employees at health-policy organizations and journalists who cover health issues.

This year the foundation expects to Webcast between 200 and 300 events — congressional hearings, press briefings, and other health-policy meetings. The number of people who watch such broadcasts online varies widely; some events pull in as few as 150 people, while others have an audience of several thousand.

Mr. Altman estimates that the total number of health-policy analysts and health journalists the foundation considers its potential audience numbers somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000. He says the foundation is still trying to figure out what criteria it should use to evaluate the success of its Webcasts.

“If you’re thinking like a TV station, an audience of 1,500 is puny,” he says. “But if you’re thinking in a different way about opening up a key meeting to 1,500 people instead of 75 people, you could view the same number as a dramatic success.”

At the same time, Mr. Altman says the foundation is trying not to focus too much on the audience numbers because it doesn’t want its work to be “driven by eyeballs.”

Ed Howard, executive vice president at the Alliance For Health Reform, a Washington health-policy organization, believes that the greatest strength of Kaiser’s Webcasts is their ability to give small charities and groups outside of Washington access to the same information available to well-heeled corporate lobbyists. He points to the example of a congressional committee session in which lawmakers are drafting health-related legislation.

“Somebody at Families USA can sit at their desk, monitor the stupid thing, know what happened, know what the arguments were, and know how formidable an opponent a particular speaker is,” says Mr. Howard.

The foundation is using both online and offline techniques in its efforts to spread the word about its HealthCast program. Among them: e-mail announcements, postal mailings, and Web links from other health organizations to the Kaisernetwork site. In addition, news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, have started to link to Kaiser’s Webcasts from their own Web sites.

Kaiser also hopes that the partnerships it’s forming with health-policy organizations will raise awareness of the service as partner organizations tell their constituencies about the Webcasts.

The first of those relationships is with the Alliance For Health Reform, which holds more than 20 briefings a year on Capitol Hill for congressional staff members and journalists. Kaiser has been broadcasting the alliance’s briefings on the Internet since February, including an event earlier this month on prescription-drug proposals for Medicare beneficiaries.

The Webcasts are archived on Kaiser’s Web site, and Mr. Howard says he often directs journalists to the archived copies of his organization’s briefings. In addition to video of the policy events, the site includes copies of any charts and handouts that speakers referred to in their presentations, as well as related information and links on the topics.

The foundation spends more than $4-million a year on the Kaisernetwork site, which includes daily news updates on health-policy issues, a database of public-opinion research, an archive of television advertisements on health topics, and a national calendar of events. Less than $1-million is earmarked for the HealthCast section of the site, although that figure does not cover special events that come up, such as last month’s opportunity to Webcast the United Nations Special Session on H.I.V./AIDS.

The foundation is fortunate not to have to raise the money for the project, says Mr. Altman, but he adds that it’s still important for the foundation to make sure that projects like the Webcasts are effectively carrying out the foundation’s mission. He explains: “HealthCast is something that could expand infinitely and swallow up more of our resources than we can afford to have it swallow up, so we need to stay very focused on our main purpose and our main audience.”

To get there: Go to http://www.kaisernetwork.org.