Sheehan Medical recently signed a deal with Boston firm MEDITECH for an integrated IT system for their new private hospital the Cork Medical Centre in Cork. It was covered in the Done Deal section of the The Sunday Business Post yesterday. Here is a link to the article, which I have also pasted in below.
Sheehan Medical invests €750,000 in IT
09 May 2010 By Elaine O’Regan
Healthcare provider Sheehan Medical is investingUS$1 million (€750,000) in an integrated IT system for its new facility, Cork Medical Centre.
The first phase of the system by Boston-based Meditech, will be completed in August in time for the centre’s opening.
The second phase of the project, which will integrate the hospital’s clinical and financial systems, will be completed early next year.
Philip Sheehan, chief operating officer of Cork Medical Centre, said that the system would make all medical information, relating to each of the hospital’s patients, accessible to all of the consultants handling their care.
‘‘This is from entry to the facility through to completion of treatment and, crucially, it can also be accessed by all medical practitioners undertaking subsequent external aftercare, such as GPs or physiotherapists,” said Sheehan.
Cork Medical Centre will be the anchor tenant in City Gate, a mixed-use scheme in Mahon by local developer John Cleary.
Extending to 135,000 square feet, the €75 million City Gate facility will have 75 in-patient rooms, four operating theatres and a same-day surgery centre with 20 out-patient beds.
The facility will also house an intensive care unit and cardiology and neuroscience units.
Projected revenues for its first year of operation are €20 million, rising to €40 million in year five.
Sheehan Medical is operated by chief executive James Sheehan and his father, Dr Joseph Sheehan, who is chairman.
Joseph Sheehan was one of the founders of the Blackrock Clinic in Dublin in 1984. He was also part of the consortium that built the Galway Clinic in 2004.
When it is completed, it is expected that Cork Medical Centre will create 300 direct jobs and 150 ancillaryp ositions. There will be 75 doctors located on-site, providing up to 39,000 patient treatments annually.
In addition to Cork Medical Centre, Philip Sheehan said that the Meditech system had been used in other Sheehan owned medical facilities.
‘‘We have been working with Meditech at our other hospitals for a number of years,” he said.
‘‘Their IT system was adopted by our Galway Clinic in 2004,where it is a great success and it is also in use at the Hermitage and Beacon clinics, and Mount Carmel Group hospitals. This type of advanced IT system is crucial to the modern patient care and the efficient running of the hospital.”
Sheehan Medical has agreed a separate US deal with Loyola University Health System, which will manage a number of services at Cork Medical Centre. In conjunction with Loyola, it is developing a €37 million hospital in Chicago.
Yesterday I released a big announcement for Sheehan Medical, the private hospital operator who are developing the Cork Medical Centre in Cork; they have signed a $1m deal with Boston IT company MEDITECH. The full media press release is here. http://www.tinyurl.ie/mt. This was covered very widely in the media yesterday, here’s The Examiner’s coverage http://www.tinyurl.ie/mu.
The story was covered on a number of local radio stations and, thanks to the internet, I was able to listen to monitor their news coverage myself from Dublin. It is very esay to obtain copies of radio coverage in MP3, the cost is about €40 from a media monitoring service, and it is quite easy to rip them from the internet yourself these days. But what is great about one radion station namely Cork’s 96 FM http://www.96fm.ie is they put transcript’s of the news coverage on their website.
This is great for us as we have a written record that we can link to and it makes a lot of sense for the radio station because they have already written scripts so they might as well us the text to add news content to their website. What would be great too if they provide the MP3 on line next to the coverage. Here’s a link to the details Cork’s 96fm covered on the Sheehan Medical announcement.
So, if you get any coverage on Cork’s 96fm and miss the coverage you should try their website, you never know what you might find (incidentally most media monitoring companies, such as Media Market, can get MP3s of the major radio stations for a month after they’ve aired).
I got a great reaction for using the embargoes video below. Well here is a follow up ‘Embargoes II; continuing along the same theme and talking the mickey out of PRs. They are made by Steve O’Hear using the Xtranormal.com website. Steve is a is a journalist with TechCrunch so he has to deal with a lot of technology PRs and fight his way through a lot of jargon. He can be followed on Twitter here http://twitter.com/sohear and more details are here http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/11/16/welcome-steve-ohear-our-new-contributing-editor/
Media embargoes – what are they? How do I use them? Dos and dont’s.
This is a brilliant animation on a discussion between a PR and a journalist in relation to an embargo on the launch of a product.
As the media changes, becomes more electronic and instant, and as newspapers compete for a skrinking share of the market, there is becoming less of a place for embargoes and they are becoming less relevant and more risky for companies to do, due to the fact that there is a higher risk that they can often broken and a story come out to early. Embargoes are generally used where a company is making a large announcement on a deal or in the run up to a launch.
An embargo, if agreed to by the journalist, allows them to be briefed in advance of the launch, but with the proviso that they don’t publish anything until the actual launch day. This can be very helpful to newspapers in particular as it means they can often run the story on the day of the launch. Often the more sensitive details are kept aside for the launch itself, thus allowing the papers to give an overview and a teaser, thereby actually encouraging attendance. This can be very beneficial to a newspaper or journalist, but where papers believe they are competing on the story there is an chance that they can break the embargo in order to be first to the market.
My rule of thumb is to use embargoes sparingly. Where you do use them only approach those media contacts you have a good, preferably long term relationship with, and who you know will not break the embargo. Ideally they should be given an ‘exclusive’ with it being made clear to the journalist that they have an exclusive and, therefore, no one else will be competing with them to get the story out. This way they do not feel under pressure to beat the competition to print. It must be indicated clearly that the embargo applies to all forms of media, such as the website, because rival newspaper will often use their website to publish a spoiler story, that is, release a story on-line to scupper an article being run in print by a rival.
The types of media titles most likely likely to break an embargo are local papers, those printed in the afternoon or evening or trade magazines. These titles often have the most to gain from breaking the embargo because they need to fight their corner for market share and exposure when competing against national daily newspapers with bigger circulation. For a local paper or trade magazine, to be seen to be breaking a big story can give them huge kudos, often way outside their circulation area. They can also get a lot of bylines, for example when I worked in property PR in London the trade magazine Property Week, which is published on a Friday, often breaks big property stories, which means they get can a mention in the Sunday papers. With a regional paper, a PR based in the capital city can often not be dealing with the titles on a daily basis so the newspaper has less to lose in terms of the relationship with the PR and their client, so they can often risk breaking the embargo. However, at the end of the day this is rare, journalists are professionals and most often will adhere to an embargo if the need for it is explained to them correctly and the benefits outlined.
Here’s a recent example of a project I was launching: I worked with a trade magazine on a very large launch last year and it worked quite well. The trade magazine publishes on the Friday and my launch was on the Thursday, but the deadline for when the trade magazine was ‘put to bed’ i.e. went to print, was Monday. I agreed with the editor of the magazine that they could have the details of the launch on Monday so that they could run with it in that week’s edition, but with the proviso that they didn’t print anything on their website or send out any news alerts before the launch. This was agreed and it worked well for both us.
Meanwhile, the weekend before, a Sunday paper carried an exclusive feature on the people behind the project, the first time they had been interviewed in Ireland, and outlined very general details on the launch. But, in order to secure this, the journalist was given a full off-the-record preview of the project with the proviso that the embargo was adhered too. We both benefited because by the time he would have printed his next issue, the Sunday after the launch, it would’ve been old news, which is a big problem for a Sunday newspapers. This way he got an exclusive on the people behind the project and was able to inform his readers of the upcoming launch. This is was great for my client because we were able to promote key individuals and give a teaser to people before the launch. Though it still made for restless night sleep the Saturday night before it appeared.
On the other side of coin a trade magazine once agreed to the embargo for that week’s print issue, but proceeded to publish day early, which was my day of the launch. This was a clever way to get around breaking the embargo by a few hours and simply blamed the publishers for getting the magazine out early. It was ‘squeaky bum time’ for me that morning because I feared the cat was out of the bag and attendance at the launch would be down. Thankfully it worked quite well in the end as it boosted exposure on the day of the event and made it a high profile launch that those in the sector couldn’t miss. I’m convinced this ‘convenient accident’ by the publishers to print a day early was planned, as it is something I would do myself if I thought I could get away with it.
My first ever boss in PR said that “in this game you need ‘peasant cunning’” and how right he was, although it is only in the last few years that I’ve come to appreciate what he meant. But this was the first time I’d experience this happening, so it is something to be checked when agreeing the embargo, to ensure that the journalist knows that you know all the tricks and state implicitly that this includes any ‘accidents’ such as early printing.
So, use embargoes sparingly and if you do use them, then do so selectively. Where possible use them exclusively and selectively to contacts that you trust. If you are worried about being broken then never ever use them as you could be jeopardising the whole PR programme if it goes wrong and frankly you’ll look like a muppet. Always think worse case scenario – that way you can’t got wrong.
Company law in Ireland requires every company to include its registered name and company number on its website. Republic has been operating November 2006 but when we moved to a Limited company set up the CRO wouldn't let us have "Republic" as a limited company name in case people thought we were doing PR for the Republic of Ireland - yes the PR for the whole country - though the business name 'Republic' is fine in their eyes. The registered company name is, therefore, Palmer PR Limited, which trades as Republic. The CRO number for Palmer PR Ltd is: 479153. Vat no: 9733176G.
10/05/2010 7:02 pm | 
