Targeting Clinicians: Leveraging Strategic Partnerships to Promote Public Health

Background: CDC is partnering with Medscape® from WebMD, part of the WebMD Professional Network, to present a weekly video commentary series designed to provide updated information to Medscape’s  audience of physicians, nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals. 

Program background:  The goal of the partnership is to provide CDC’s authoritative guidance to clinicians by using Medscape’s web-based channels.  The CDC guidance includes updates in evidenced-based recommendations that affect public health or clinical practice.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Medscape launched the “CDC Expert Commentary Series” in November of 2009 (during the beginning of the 2009 H1N1 vaccination campaign) at the following url: http://www.medscape.com/partners/cdc/public/cdc-commentary.  The commentary series originally featured clinical recommendations on 2009 H1N1 and seasonal influenza vaccination, influenza disease in vulnerable populations (e.g., pregnant women, children), infection control for healthcare facilities, and travel medicine during the 2009-2010 flu season.  Since then, the commentary series has shifted focus to include a broad range of topics as jointly  decided upon by Medscape and CDC.  The commentary series is marketed on Medscape’s homepage, Medscape topic-specific pages, and throughout the CDC.gov website and relevant listservs.  A weekly email newsletter, Medscape's MedPulse, highlights the commentary series and serves to drive traffic to the site.  Medscape can target healthcare professionals based on an opt-in registration, allowing for email newsletters to target healthcare professional by specialty.  As the leading online provider of clinical information for physicians and other healthcare professionals, Medscape receives 2 million physician visits and 1 million visits from nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals each month.  Between November 2009 and April 2010, twenty videos have been posted as part of the CDC Expert Commentary Series and have been viewed more the 224,000 times by Medscape healthcare professionals.  Each video has been viewed an average of 11,200 times (range from 1,200—54,000 viewers).  In addition, Medscape provides related resources (e.g., guidelines) to support the featured commentary by offering additional context to the video and more information for the viewer.

Conclusions: This public-private partnership is a good example of how collaborative efforts and leveraging of resources and strengths can expand message reach.  CDC and Medscape are working collaboratively to take the knowledge gained from this partnership to expand educational efforts aimed at healthcare providers. 

Implications for research and/or practice: Lessons learned from this partnership confirm the importance of providing timely information, education and training for clinicians.  These lessons can be applied to other comprehensive outreach efforts targeting clinicians and will be invaluable for future public health emergencies.