50 Public Health Blogs Worth Connecting With

February 10, 2014 

In healthcare, information and time are valued assets. Being able to stay abreast of — and, in some instances, anticipate — trends means more than a contribution to a fiscal bottom line; quality of life for your patients and their communities is the “return on investment” for your efforts. This comprehensive recap of 50 top health care blogs can keep you informed and effective in your role as a health care provider.

Major Media Outlets


The media is a conduit between the public and health care professionals, and serves as both arbiter and influencer for behaviors and habits that can influence how healthy we are as a society. Further, in those critical, crisis situations–having a clear, unimpeded flow of accurate information can prove to be priceless.

Organizations/Foundations


Your effectiveness as a health care professional is enhanced and developed by specific organizations and foundations that add to your growing body of knowledge and experience. These may help direct your energies and efforts.

  • 12. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF): New Public Health
    This is an online community designed to be a communication hub for public health professionals interested in learning and sharing information about quality improvement in public health.
  • 13. Health News Review: Health News Watchdog Blog
    This blog is dedicated to evaluations of health care journalism, advertising, marketing, public relations and other messages that may influence consumers and provides criteria that consumers can use to evaluate these messages themselves.
  • 14. The World Health Care Congress (WHCC): WHCC Innovations
    This site offers peer-to-peer articles and research with a global perspective. It also features the ability to contribute content.
  • 15. National Center for Policy Analysis: John Goodman’s Health Policy Blog
    One of the most popular health policy blogs, this is the place where pro-free-enterprise, private-sector solutions to health care problems are routinely vetted by experts from across the political spectrum.
  • 16. Alliance for Aging Research
    This blog aims to be a go-to site for policymakers, members of the media and consumers who want a personal, inside look at the Alliance’s activities and perspective on a range of timely issues.
  • 17. Kaiser Health News (KHN): Capsules, The KHN Blog
    To complement their coverage of health care policy and politics, this blog provides a platform for staff-written news and observations, outside voices and commentary, and other timely and interactive features.
  • 18. Let’s Move Blog
    This is an all-inclusive blog geared toward both the public and healthcare providers to facilitate a dialogue about what it takes to contribute to a shift in childhood obesity and create a healthy generation of young Americans.
  • 19. Consumers Union: Not in My Food
    An outgrowth of Consumer Reports Magazine, this blog is written by a team of food safety advocates that focuses on the nation’s food systems and its relationship to a healthy population.
  • 20. Social Health Insights LLC
    Their existence is a response to the NowTrending2012  application challenge, whose goal is to build social analytic platforms that positively impact global health, further innovation and research, and will enhance population health awareness of disease and illness trends.
  • 21. Blacksmith: Pollution Blog
    The Pollution Blog highlights cleanup work at the world’s worst polluted places and tracks worldwide efforts to bring an end to life-threatening pollution, one site at a time.
  • 22. Research Accelerator: Resources for Public Health Research
    This blog supports and celebrates research excellence at The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services by sharing information and updates on their research and investigators, recent grants and awards, upcoming funding opportunities and insights on timely topics with an overarching purpose to equip investigators with resources and to promote communication, collaboration and success.

Public Health Professionals


Peer-to-peer sources are invaluable when focusing on a specific discipline or area of study. Related to but different from organizations, these blogs feature a prominent, respected voice in the blogosphere.

  • 23. Susan Blumenthal: Huffington Post
    Rear Admiral Susan J. Blumenthal, M.D., M.P.A. provided distinguished service for more than 20 years as a leading national U.S. government health expert and spokesperson. She currently serves as the director of the Health and Medicine Program at the Center for the Study of the Presidency where she co-chairs its Health Commission.
  • 24. Bob Laszewki: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review
    Robert Laszewski is president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, LLC (HPSA), a policy and marketplace consulting firm specializing in assisting its clients through the significant health policy and market change afoot.
  • 25. Brian Klepper: Care and Cost
    Brian R. Klepper, PhD is a health care analyst and commentator whose health care perspectives have been featured by the CBS Evening News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the Washington Post, and whose published works appear in Kaiser Health News, Medscape, Healthleaders, The New England Journal of Medicine, Modern Healthcare, Business Insurance and newspapers nationally.
  • 26. Joseph Paduda: Managed Care Matters
    Joseph Paduda is a nationally recognized expert, speaker, media source and author on managed care in group health and in workers’ compensation whose perspectives are informed by his background in sales, marketing and management positions with managed care and insurance companies, including MetraComp, a United Health Care Company, Travelers Health Company, Liberty Mutual and American International Healthcare/AIG.
  • 27. Maggie Mahar: Health Beat
    The author of “Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs so Much,” Mahar also served as the co-writer of the documentary Money-Driven Medicine. Mahar’s previous publishing experience includes Barron’s, Time Inc., The New York Times and other publications.
  • 28. Jane Sarasohn-Kahn: HEALTHPoluli
    Jane Sarasohn-Kahn is a health economist and management consultant who serves clients at the intersection of health and technology, specifically all stakeholders in health (including providers, payors and plans); companies in biopharma, medical devices, financial services, technology and consumer goods; and non-profits and NGOs.
  • 29. Paul Levy: Not Running a Hospital
    Paul Levy is the former president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and was previously executive director of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, where he was famous for leading the Boston Harbor Cleanup. Levy also served as chairman of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities and executive dean for administration of Harvard Medical School and is the co-author of “Negotiating Environmental Agreements.”
  • 30. Lynch Ryan: Workers’ Comp Insider
    While not an individual, Lynch Ryan is a consulting firm that helps employers, insurers, third-party administrators, industry associations and government bodies to build and implement highly effective worker compensation cost-control systems.
  • 31. David Harlow: HealthBlawg
    David Harlow is a health care lawyer and consultant with more than 25 years of public- and private-sector experience, whose clients include health care providers, vendors and payors of all shapes and sizes who rely on him to help them navigate the maze of regulatory and business issues facing them on a daily basis.
  • 32. David Williams: Health Business Blog
    David E. Williams is co-founder of MedPharma Partners LLC; strategy consultant to pharma, biotech, device and technology enabled healthcare services industries; formerly with BCG and LEK.
  • 33. Jeanne Scott’s Health Politics
    Jeanne Scott Matthews has been one of the nation’s leading health care lobbyists, having spent almost 40 years inside the beltway working both within and without the government and serving during the first Reagan administration as senior counsel in the Office of the General Counsel, for the Health Care Financing Administration. She was instrumental in founding the Association for Electronic Health Care Transactions, served on the Board and Executive Committee of the Workgroup on EDI in Health Care and helped draft the original “Bond Bill,” which became the administrative simplification provisions in HIPAA.
  • 34. Alison Bass
    Alison Bass is the author of “Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial,” the true story of two women — a prosecutor and a whistleblower — who exposed the deception behind the making of a blockbuster drug. Bass is an award-winning journalist and long-time medical writer for The Boston Globe. Her articles and essays have also appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, The Village Voice, Psychology Today, Technology Review, Reader’s Digest and numerous other newspapers and magazines around the country.
  • 35. Rick Ungar: The Policy Page
    Billed as Forbes magazine’s official “token lefty,” Rick Ungar often annoys progressives just as much as he upsets conservative thinkers. In addition to the pages of Forbes.com, he may be found every Saturday morning on TV arguing with his more conservative colleagues on “Forbes on Fox” on the Fox News network.

Other Blogs of Note


There are certain blogs whose strengths are difficult to file under one category. These 15 “miscellaneous” blogs round out the list of the top 50 health care blogs you should be reading.

  • 36. WEGO Health Blog
    Here you’ll find a collection of posts with resources, tips, activities and ideas to inspire your journey in health activism. Whether you’re curious about health social media or already run your own health community, there is something for everyone.
  • 37. Health Care Economist
    Written by policy wonk and statistics wunkerkind Jason Shafrin, this blog draws praise from policy and economic sources across media and perspectives, including Slate and The Economist.
  • 38. The Health Care Blog
    Dense and content rich, this blog gives a compendious 360 degree look at all things health care, ranging from legislation to payors to tech. A rich insiders resource.
  • 39. INSUREBLOG
    Edited by Henry Stern, LUTCF, CBC, and Bob Vineyard, CLU, this blog addresses insurance issues, principles and solutions through the lense of policy and legislation.
  • 40. #PubHT: Public Health Talks
    For an invaluable insight into real-time conversations in the public health arena, consider joining #PubHT (Public Health Talks), a chat on Twitter for public health professionals. This hour-long chat occurs at 9 P.M. EDT on the first and third Monday of each month.
  • 41. Discover’s Health & Medicine
    This site offers a general information blog with an assortment of articles that range from public interest to microbiology.
  • 42. MobiHealthNews
    MobiHealthNews, founded in 2008, has quickly become the leading provider of news, commentary, online events and research for the global mobile health community.
  • 43. Health Wonk Review 
    An organically formed online community, this blog provides a forum for some of the brightest people, clearest thinking, most perceptive commentary and keenest observations in the health policy community. Addressed are health policy, funding, insurance, managed care, infrastructure, IT, the uninsured, economics and trends.
  • 44. The Health Care IT Guy
    Even doctors need a diagnostic when encountering The Blue Screen of Death. Shahid Shah is the IT Guy for health care professionals. Shahid is an internationally recognized enterprise software analyst who specializes in healthcare IT with an emphasis on e-health, EHR/EMR, Meaningful Use, data integration, medical device connectivity, health informatics and legacy modernization.
  • 45. Health Care Renewal
    This forum is dedicated to addressing threats to health care’s core values, especially those stemming from concentration and abuse of power. Advocating for accountability, integrity, transparency, honesty and ethics in leadership and governance of health care.
  • 46. Covering Health
    Covering Health is a blog maintained by the Association of Health Care Journalists, an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to advancing public understanding of health care issues. The blog is intended to help keep journalists who report on health and health care issues informed about the latest news in the field, aware of noteworthy stories and reports, and able to connect with colleagues.
  • 47. The Pump Handle
    Considered the “water cooler” of the public health community and so named for the removal of the pump handle at Broad Street during the cholera during the 1854 outbreak in London, this general information blog provides a broad cross-section of topics that concern public health issues.
  • 48. ACO Watch
    Serving in a “who’s watching the watchers” capacity, ACOWatch is interested in Accountable Care Organizations, tracking their incidence and prevalence while educating and informing both consumers and professionals.
  • 49. Health 2.0
    Serving as an across-the-board resource for “news for and about the Health 2.0 Community,” Health 2.0 provides editorial, news, events and other tools for healthcare providers.
  • 50. HealthInsurance.org Blog
    This is a thorough and detailed resource for all things related to insurance, including policy and legislation.