The renowned Mayo Clinic offers not just clinical medical care but also health information — both for individuals and for the media. I spoke recently with Lee Aase, who manages Mayo’s social media and much of its news, and with Joel Streed, who produces Mayo’s free syndicated daily medical-news podcast. They explained how to find health news and information on Mayo’s several websites — and the various ways it might be useful to journalists.
There are two main places to look: mayoclinic.com and mayoclinic.org. Each has a different focus. Mayoclinic.com, Aase explained, provides free consumer health info — “analogous to webMD.” (Search here by disease, here for podcasts, or here for videos.) It also offers syndicated “health content” for a fee.
Mayoclinic.org works a little differently. Its information arm focuses primarily on medical news — and especially on news relevant to the practice of medicine at Mayo. Its natural primary audience is therefore the communities surrounding Mayo’s three clinics, though in reality much of the information is also useful to a global audience. Its news blog and Medical Edge videos and podcasts are good places to start. Medical Edge content is freely usable and embeddable by anyone.
Aase and Streed explained a couple of ways that the news blog and Medical Edge could be useful to pubmedia journalists: they can be a source of story ideas and leads for guests, their content can be embedded or linked to directly from station websites, and the audio/video resources can be a quick way to vet possible Mayo experts — to judge, for example, whether they’re good talkers or camera ready. (If you book a Mayo guest for a show, it’s possible to use Mayo’s in-house ISDN and satellite uplink facilities free of charge.)
Because much of the technology that Aase’s team uses is nimble — a WordPress blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flip cameras — it’s able to react quickly to breaking news, which is especially useful during public-health crises.
Here are some examples of their work on H1N1:
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["Dr. Greg Poland and Dr. Bill Marshall on H1N1 and Seasonal Flu," 24 Oct 09]
["H1N1 Flu and Asthma in Kids", 17 Nov 09]
["Mayo Clinic Physician: 'H1N1 Vaccine Is Safe'," 28 Oct 09]
["Swine Flu FAQs," 27 April 09]