EHealth Insider started life on 13 December 2001, when the first newsletter opened with the mission statement: "In every part of healthcare, information technology is changing the way managers and clinical staff work, the way services are delivered and how health consumers think and behave.
"EHealth Media's central purpose is to explain these changes to business, professional and consumer audiences, and help healthcare organisations to realise the full potential of electronic communications."
The newsletter caught the tide of interest generated by the New Labour government's decision to invest in healthcare IT. The tide was given force by a speech by Sir John Pattison, the Department of Health's director of R&D, at the 2002 Healthcare Computing show.
In his landmark speech, Sir John announced a new national programme, based on infrastructure, electronic records, booked admissions and e-prescribing. It set in motion the foundation of the National Programme for IT in the NHS and later the creation of the IT agency, NHS Connecting for Health.
The newsletter gathered a devoted audience of about 2,000 and eHealth Media founders, Jon Hoeksma and Linda Davidson, decided to change the company website to reflect the growing enthusiasm for eHealth Insider and to publish advertising from commercial supporters.
The first series of advertisements came from Siemens, promoting its Soarian system. Others followed and most have stayed. Early advertisers such as First DataBank, iSoft, Emis, TPP and InterSystems remain valued clients today.
EHealth Insider's coverage of the new national programme attracted huge interest. On a couple of occasions, the sheer weight of traffic made the site crash; and most of the company's early revenues were spent on technology to make it more stable.
2003 marked the start of real growth and the appointment of EHI's first staff, apart from the founders. By the end of the year the site had over 6,000 registered users.
GPs have always been in the lead on the use of IT in UK healthcare, and this was reflected in the company's first development, eHealth Insider Primary Care, in January 2004.
Later that year, EHI Jobs launched and quickly became the new place for recruitment in healthcare IT. The weekly EHI Jobs newsletter is now followed by about 8,000 registered job seekers.
Awards were the next venture to follow in 2007. These were made possible by the generous principal sponsor, BT, and numerous others including Quicksilva - who deserve a special mention for having sponsored a category every year from the awards' start.
Healthcare Interoperability, a one-day show in Birmingham in October 2008, launched eHealth Insider's venture in conferences and exhibitions. It was followed in 2009 by eHealth Insider Live, a two-day event which attracted nearly 1,000 visitors and over 80 exhibitors and sponsors.
2009-10 also saw the start of much greater use of video on the eHealth Insider site, with video diaries chronicling the thoughts of healthcare IT people out on the front line and a weekly feature, EHI TV, offering a video summary of the week's news or interviews with leaders in healthcare IT.