The Top 10 Health Stories of 2009

When it comes to staying on top of the collective news cycle, accurately tracking and knowing the stories that prompt conversation is the key. Being connected to the audience and their interests is impossible without an understanding of what has mattered in the past.

Health reform on Capitol Hill, the H1N1 virus, breakthroughs in cancer and obesity research, and the merging of Pfizer and Wyeth into the world’s largest pharma company were all big news in 2009.

While several organizations have done a nice job of synthesizing the top issues driving healthcare news coverage this past year (Harvard Health Letter, Time Magazine), our Media and Technology group went a step further to examine the exact articles that had the greatest impact online.

Starting from a list of more than 500 news articles and blog posts, WCG developed a simple algorithm to zero in on the Top 10 stories from 2009.  The ranking, highlighted below, considers factors such as the number of websites that link to an article, how many people commented on it, how broadly it was disseminated in Twitter and top social bookmarking sites, and how many websites referenced the article’s headline.

We look forward to discussing with you more about how we arrived at the Top 10 and using similar analytics and approaches as we continue to innovate new ways of analyzing what drives influence online.  Please use the Comments section below to add your thoughts.

Top 10 Stories of 2009

 

Rank	Index*	Headline	Author	Outlet
1	100	House Democrats pass health-care bill	Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray	Washington Post
2	59.36922	Why We Need Health Care Reform	Barrack Obama	NY Times
3	56.66738	Obama signs massive, 'imperfect' spending bill	Danny DeFreitas (Deputy Editor)	MSNBC
4	48.59569	Congress Slams Panel for New Mammogram Guidelines	John McKenzie and John Parkinson	ABC News
5	42.31632	HIV/AIDS: The incurable epidemic	Fred Hiatt (Editor)	Washington Post
6	34.41015	24 hours in the ER' shows challenges of health system	Susan Page, Marisol Bello, John Fritze, Mary Brophy Marcus and Liz Szabo	USA Today
7	34.22327	WHO raises pandemic alert to second-highest level	Vital Signs Blog--Contributors Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Barbara Starr	CNN
8	28.60779	Senate Blocks Use of New Mammogram Guidelines	David M. Herszehorn	NY Times Prescriptions Blog
9	27.43842	New guidelines: Pap smears can start at 21	Julia Sommerfeld (Editor)	MSNBC
10	18.03716	Obama Ends Stem Cell Research Ban	CBS News	Associated Press

*Index: the measure that defines the relative impact of each article when compared with all of the articles collected from 2009; This is the final output from the algorithm describes above. This list brings to life the common concerns and interest of the broad healthcare audience. This ranges from the average person who simply keeps up with the news to the top health industry executive who never stops monitoring the issues. Now, what will the focus be in 2010? It’s impossible to know, but I leave you with the proof that news flow matters and the stories the audience chooses are what drives it.