Editors’ Expressions: How to Cover a New Product

In January EMS World published an update on head elevation in CPR, an emerging intervention that’s showing promising data in animal and cadaver testing and seems poised for wider adoption in prehospital care. But like many stories in the EMS realm, it posed some challenges in handling and approach. This new forum seems a good platform to elaborate.

Elevating the head takes a product. When Palm Beach County rescuers first adopted the tactic almost five years ago, they used a simple Pelican case inserted beneath the patient. Now there’s the EleGARD, which provides controlled multilevel elevation over a timed sequence, reflecting the latest research on both the optimal degree to which to raise and point and speed with which to get there.

It’s a new product being used in a newish intervention, so how do you cover it in a way that doesn’t feel like, as one Facebook commenter dismissively phrased it, a “long commercial painted up to look like an article”?

More broadly, how can you cover all the issues of EMS in a way that’s accurate and objective—and seen as that way by readers—when you’re financed by advertiser support?

Micro-issues first: I get the commenter’s skepticism, if not cynicism. Skepticism is good—there’s no shortage of people, even in the medical fields, willing to take your money for crap you don’t need. Ask hard questions, wait for hard data, be a later adopter if that’s your nature. That’s smart stewardship and a needed balance.

Then again, some products work. If head elevation to the EleGARD’s parameters really does help improve outcomes and you wave off the findings as a sales ploy, you’re hardly doing your best for your patients.

Being a savvy consumer in the EMS marketplace is no different than being a savvy consumer of news or anything else: It’s your challenge to navigate between wide-eyed credulity and a jaded, lazy inertia. That doesn’t come from any single source of information. Read EMS World…but read other stuff too. Read medical journals and experts’ opinions and vendors’ documentation. Seek perspectives from your peers and other smart people. Don’t buy an EleGARD, or anything, because we reported about it in an article but because you’re convinced by the evidence that it’s a wise use of your money.

Being a smart shopper is your end of the bargain—what about ours?

That’s the macro-issue: Accurate and objective means you can’t oversell something like this, even if they’re buying an ad. The publications serving our industry (and indeed across business publishing) have all likely crossed this line at some point, but I don’t think anyone here has ever tried to intentionally mislead. We hope and try, as EMS providers and journalists and professionals, to balance the promise of the new and innovative with a franker view of limitations and realities. (And FWIW, I think most vendors and advertisers respect that.)

I thought about this a lot when writing the January piece. I hope it successfully emphasized that the head-elevation data to date, while promising, is largely from pigs and cadavers. I hope, by not discussing the EleGARD until later in the piece, it felt less about the product than the intervention and research behind it. I hope it was clear that the main source for the piece, while an accomplished and pioneering physician, had a financial interest in the device, though that was not specifically spelled out and there’s no reason to think it influenced any findings. It was quite clear, I think, that the EleGARD alone won’t save lives, and that its benefit appears to come in conjunction with other essential measures.

I thought we handled it judiciously, but that’s ultimately decided by readers. In that spirit, the inbox remains open to thoughts, feedback, and suggestions for how to handle similar future issues in a way that informs—accurately and objectively and entertainingly—without fueling cynicism about motivations and mistrust of content.

John Erich is the senior editor of EMS World. Reach him at john.erich@emsworld.com.