The Kaiser Family Foundation and the SCAN Foundation have agreed on a funding arrangement as of November 2008 that will enable the forthcoming Kaiser Health News (KHN) service to provide in-depth coverage of healthcare issues of concern to America's senior population.
The 3-year commitment from the SCAN Foundation will result in coverage of healthcare issues affecting the nation's population aged 65 years and older, including longer-form articles, interviews, webcasts, and other Web-based materials. Topics covered will include long-term care, Medicare and other health coverage for seniors, affordability, and delivery of care for seniors among others.
The Kaiser Family Foundation recently announced that it will launch KHN, an independent news service, to report on the nation's complex healthcare system and the increasingly urgent political and policy debates surrounding it.
The centerpiece of KHN will be in-depth stories on new developments in the healthcare system and on healthcare initiatives and debates in Washington and in state capitals. Supplementing the stories will be columns, video interviews, graphics, and multimedia features, as well as a daily synthesis of news stories from around the country, which Kaiser already provides.
All news content will be available for free on a new Web site, http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org. Also, KHN will enter into partnerships with news organizations to jointly produce and publish articles and will provide content for syndication to news organizations in the United States and around the world, free of charge.
Two award-winning, veteran healthcare journalists, Laurie McGinley and Peggy Girshman, will helm KHN, who will also make all editorial decisions. Over the next several months, a team of full-time journalists will be hired and top freelance journalists will be recruited to write stories and series for distribution through KHN. An advisory board of prominent leaders in the journalism community, to be announced at a later date, will provide guidance to KHN.
The Kaiser Family Foundation is a nonprofit private-operating foundation, based in Menlo Park, CA, dedicated to producing and communicating the best possible information, research, and analysis on health issues. For more information, visit http://www.kff.org.
The SCAN Foundation is an independent nonprofit foundation dedicated to advancing the development of a sustainable continuum of quality care for seniors that integrates medical treatment and human services in the settings most appropriate to their needs and with the greatest likelihood of a healthy, independent life. The SCAN Foundation supports programs that stimulate public engagement, develop realistic public policy and financing options, and disseminate promising care models and technologies (http://www.thescanfoundation.org).