About

The Health Benefit News River aggregates content from multiple health care industry blogs and news publications into an easily accessible and highly readable River of News. We syndicate general healthcare industry news and opinion with a special focus on technology and health benefit related topics. This includes, but is not limited to, the following types of content:

This service is provided free of charge by ProServe Health Informatics with the goal of increasing exposure to self-publishing health experts, health technology vendors, and other health related internet publications.

We believe these markets are conversations and have an interest in promoting and facilitating this conversation.

History

This site was originally created for use by ProServe Health Informatics staff in late 2006. The intent was then, as it is today, to make it dead-simple to keep up with industry news and opinion by bringing relevant content to a single place where it could be perused a few times a day with minimal hassle. We found that having a shared sense of current industry-related opinion and events created healthy discussion internally and also promoted conversation externally.

The site became so successful as an internal experiment that we decided to make it available to a wider audience as The Health Benefit News River.

What is a “River of News”?

A News Aggregator (or “News Reader”) is a tool that retrieves content from multiple web sites at regular intervals and creates a consolidated view of that content. News Aggregators come in various shapes and sizes: desktop applications, web-based tools, and home-page portal widget thingies, to name a few (see News on Feeds's big list of aggregators for more information.)

Most news reading applications offer advanced features and a high level of customization but are somewhat lacking in simplicity. Operating a full blown news aggregator isn’t rocket surgery but they certainly require more work to get setup than, say, clicking a link received in email. A “River of News” aggregator is a normal website with a pre-configured feed list and a simplified interface.

Dave Winer, self-proclaimed co-inventor of RSS and blogging pioneer, describes the benefits of River of News style aggregators and contrasts them with the more prevalent, email-style aggregators in this short essay from 2005:

But there’s another kind of reader, an aggregator, that works differently, and I think more efficiently for the human reader. Instead of having to hunt for new stories by clicking on the titles of feeds, you just view the page of new stuff and scroll through it. It’s like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. If you miss one, no big deal. You can even make the river flow backward by moving the scollbar up. To me, this more approximates the way I read a print newspaper, actually it’s the way I wish I could read a print newspaper — instead of having to go to the stories, they come to me. This makes it easier for me to use my brain’s powerful scanning mechanism. It’s faster, I can subscribe to more, and my fingers do less work.

Technology

This site runs on FreeBSD with lighttpd and would not be possible without the excellent work of the Planet project. Sam Ruby’s Venus branch and Mark Pilgrim’s work on The Universal Feed Parser have been instrumental in dealing with the horribly broken syndication feeds that are all to common in the health blogosphere.

If you find this site useful, please consider supporting any of the projects mentioned.

Contact

Questions, comments, and requests for feed addition/removal should be directed to Ryan Tomayko.