Welcome to the Healthcare Journal of Northern California. We are here to inform you about our dynamic local health care industry. The information on these pages will keep you appraised about your colleagues, local research, academic medical centers, managed care changes that can impact your business and patients, and much more.
The Bay Area health care industry is one of the largest in the nation, and often in the forefront of medical and policy innovations. Health care in Northern California is an industry estimated to be over $60 billion serving more than 8 million people. The healthcare industry is often the largest employer in any one community. This large, important, and evolving industry needs its own publication to communicate the vast amount of changes in the local health-care marketplace.
Northern California is home to nearly 20,000 doctors, 100 hospitals, hundreds of biotech and pharmaceutical companies, countless healthcare workers, three major academic medical centers and more than 8 million potential patients. We live in a dynamic community, bustling with clinical research, new technology developments, new medical products and plenty of healthcare policy issues to talk about.
Physicians, hospitals and other medical providers are the primary target audience of this ground-breaking publication, and you are a charter member of its elite subscription base.
The Healthcare Journal of Northern California will be delivered to more than 30,000 medical professionals in the Bay Area and Sacramento. As a free newspaper, the goal is to reach a distribution of more than 45,000 by the end of 2008. A Web site, www.healthcarejournalnorcal.com is under construction, and can be visited to view past and present content as well as breaking news stories and other exciting features.
The Healthcare Journal will provide readers with the most important news that influences the direction of healthcare for thousands of medical and biomedical technology professionals, policy makers, human resources personnel, patients and their families.
Our original content will provide information on the latest changes in the community as it relates to research, government policy, drugs, managed care, administration, employment, philanthropy, diagnostic imaging, hospital, clinics and much more. We are an independent newspaper with the highest journalistic standards and we take no political or commercial standpoint.
The Healthcare Journal of Northern California will have original local content in each publication and occasionally publish stories on national issues that influence local health care. In addition to news stories, the paper will include features, columns, and briefs about people, places, and partnerships. Like all newspapers, the Healthcare Journal will also have editorials, letters to the editor and political cartoons. We respectfully solicit your contributions for news content and your opinions about anything having to do with healthcare and medicine.
The newspaper will initially be published on a quarterly basis through next year. Later, The Healthcare Journal will upgrade to a monthly publication. The Journal is owned and published by Palo Alto Medical Publishing Inc., which is owned by a private group of medical professionals and investors. The executive editor is Mr. Troy May, who has years of experience in health-care journalism. To submit any story ideas, e-mail May at tmay@healthcarejournalnorcal.com.

We hope that The Healthcare Journal of Northern California will soon become your indispensable source of news and commentary on health care. And we thank our advertisers and other supporters who have helped in launching this original publishing enterprise.

Dr. Richard Adrouny is the Publisher for Healthcare Journal of Northern California

--By Dr. Richard Adrouny