Health Service Journal's origins date back to 1892. But its latest product launch - an insight-based subscription service called HSJ Intelligence, is not just decidedly 21st century but set to influence HSJ publisher EMAP's approach to new product development over the years ahead.
To understand HSJ Intelligence, you must first get to grips with the market weekly title HSJ and its website - hsj.co.uk - serves, explains Andy Baker, EMAP's managing director, public sector & healthcare with responsibility for titles also including Local Government Chronicle and Nursing Times.
Aimed at healthcare leaders, HSJ reports on and is widely read by those working in and with the NHS. Around two thirds of its 16,000 paying subscribers come from the public sector while one third are from private companies and third sector organisations, such as charities and think tanks.
"As a brand, HSJ is flying. 2013 was our second consecutive year of double digit revenue growth and subscriptions grew by 12% in volume year on year - the result of growing demand from within and outside the NHS for information," he claims.
"We are serving an extraordinarily large industry - the NHS in England, spends £120bn of our taxes each year, and when you add in social care, this accounts for around 10% of GDP. Meanwhile, as a result of medical advances and an ageing population, demand for healthcare services is rising fast."
But it's not just about scale.
Serving a changing market
Under recently introduced healthcare reforms, the NHS is becoming increasingly fragmented - run not directly by the Department of Health but by the hundreds of healthcare commissioning organisations who decide which health services should be commissioned from which healthcare providers to meet the best needs of each particular local area.
Against this backdrop is the shift towards outsourcing certain healthcare and related services to the private sector and, furthermore, unprecedented pressure on healthcare providers to deliver ever-increasing healthcare services ever-more cost-efficiently. Which is where HSJ Intelligence comes in.
NHS leaders are facing incredible challenges to increase the services they provide to meet rising demand on pretty much static budgets, Baker explains. They must grow efficiencies to release resources to plough back into frontline healthcare. And to do this, they need private sector expertise like never before.
"Efficiencies could come from a private technology provider helping a hospital flow patients through that hospital faster. Or by outsourcing blood tests. Or by selling off unused estate," he says. "However, by being so huge and so fragmented, the NHS is very difficult to sell to."
Launched in March this year and priced at four to five times the typical £2,000 to £3,000 annual corporate subscription to HSJ, HSJ Intelligence was conceived to help private sector suppliers pinpoint, target and predict where their greatest opportunities in the NHS lie.
Powered by editorial content produced by HSJ's experienced editorial team, its aim is to arm senior business development professionals with high level data and insight they can use at a board level meeting to demonstrate their understanding of the issues that NHS organisation faces not just today but tomorrow.
The HSJ Intelligence offering
The proposition comprises two pillars.
The first is 450 detailed profiles of every NHS commissioner - or, in the target user's terms: prospective customers - in the country. Each includes board level leadership team profiles (including direct links to relevant people's Twitter accounts) as well as maps displaying that organisation's local catchment area detailing key customers and stakeholders.
Every profile also includes a comprehensive array of data relating to that organisation's activity and performance, including an estimate of the efficiency challenge they face. Some of this data is publically available but drawn together for the first time, other data is exclusive - gathered by the HSJ team through Freedom of Information requests.
The second pillar is predictive analysis of the different challenges each organisation might face in the near future, with an assessment of which organisations might have greatest need of what particular kind of product or services as a result of a range of different scenarios - new piece of government legislation, for example, or a flu pandemic.
Optimised to work across smartphone and tablet as well as desktop computer, HSJ Intelligence is EMAP's first fully responsive site. Underpinned by a searchable database, it also allows users to identify potential customers of similar size and needs to existing customers anywhere in the country.
A template for future development
How HSJ Intelligence was developed provides a clear indicator for how EMAP will approach new product development moving forward, Baker suggests. For it was co-created with eight private companies (prospective customers for the product) which worked closely as 'build partners' with Baker and HSJ editor Alastair McLellan.
"In early 2013, we interviewed 40 private sector suppliers to understand the issues they face selling to the NHS and from this we got half a dozen or so decent new product ideas," he explains. "We then developed the gist of HSJ Intelligence and took it back to discuss through face to face interviews in April and May."
After having the idea - and budget - green lit by EMAP management in July last year, work building the product began in September.
Build partners met to feed in to product development every two to three weeks. EMAP expanded its existing UK-based content team as well as using a content updating team already established by EMAP's owner, Top Right Group (TRG), in India. The website itself was developed by a specialist development house based in Ukraine.
"Co-creation is not a new idea but this is the best example I've personally worked on," says Baker, who joined EMAP in 2011 after spending ten years running online businesses including Friends Reunited, where he was group managing director, Trinity Mirror Digital Recruitment and jobs site Workthing.
"You've got to be brave to go so early with clients, but it is an invaluable process. They said we want more of this, but don't waste your time on that. They absolutely shaped the nature of the content and data on which this product is built."
HSJ Intelligence is a first for EMAP in the UK. But it's not the first intelligence product from TRG - the business formed following Apax Partners / Guardian Media Group's acquisition of EMAP in 2008.
Following a number of divestments and a re-structuring in spring 2012, TRG focused its interests on five businesses: EMAP, Lions Festivals, i2i events, WGSN Group and 4C. WGSN and MEED - EMAP's Middle East business intelligence specialist - already have subscription-based intelligence products.
“The sixteen titles within EMAP span a number of sectors but all cover large parts of the economy spanning lots of different organisations with leadership teams, financials and other important market data which people want to keep track of which is why we will replicate what we have done here across a number of our other brands," Baker says.
It's all part of TRG's vision for the business moving forwards.
Last summer, EMAP unveiled a new tiered model for B2B subscriptions for Retail Week and HSJ - part of a strategy to accelerate the company's focus on driving organic growth from multiplatform sales and also building new revenue from non-ad sales.
Then, further insight into the company's strategy came earlier this year when TRG chief executive Duncan Painter presented the closing key note speech on the first day of The Media Briefing's Digital Media Strategies conference.
“We want to be the best source of content and be something [the audience] really value. We want people to be willing to pay for the valued content we create, and we want to be experts, but only in certain areas. We are not spreading ourselves an inch deep and a mile wide," Painter said.
"We ask the fundamental questions: is the content good for the customer? Do they need it? And will they value it?"
"The absolute essence of what we do is paid content with revenues through subscriptions and or events. It’s a simple model, really: if you can build a community of senior professionals who want to buy your content, you can build revenue streams from other people who want to reach them," Baker explains.
"But first you need that community. And to get that community you need to provide them with the content that they want and need. Which is why HSJ Intelligence is very much an articulation of what EMAP is about, where we want to go, and how we are going to get there."
The new launch is a clear demonstration of the up side of getting clients involved in new product development at as early a stage as is feasible, says Baker.
Even if it feels risky, there is value in knowing sooner rather than later if your prospective customers won't like what you are proposing - because there's simply no point in trying to push water uphill.
"The danger is how easy it is for a (product development) team to believe their own smoke and fool themselves," he observes.
"When you're up against a deadline, you will spool together the most convincing case possible and may not realise that, by talking to itself, your organisation is moving further and further away from the needs of the people who will actually buy your product."
It's why his greatest learning from the HSJ Intelligence experience is the rigour, the discipline and the positive energy that's the upside you get from going early to clients, he adds. Because it's obvious, really. To succeed as a paid content subscription business, customer needs must come first.
