ChristianaCare Earns IABC Silver Quill Award for Innovative Use of Technology to Connect Journalists and News Producers with Health Care Experts

ExpertFile-powered “Our Experts” site makes health experts findable and accessible to media at a click of a button

ChristianaCare and its collaborative partner ExpertFile have been recognized with a 2022 Silver Quill Award from the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) for its "Our Experts" media database.

Designed to easily and quickly connect journalists to subject-matter experts, this online resource has been recognized with the top prize – an “Award of Excellence” in the Communications Management, Media Relations category. The IABC Silver Quill Awards showcase business communication excellence and are acknowledged as among the most prestigious awards programs in the communications industry.

“I’m proud to accept the Silver Quill Award on behalf of our organization and our incredible Communications team, including our ExpertFile partners,” said Shane Hoffman, communications director at ChristianaCare. “The ‘Our Experts’ platform has given us next-level ways to engage our experts and share our knowledge as a trusted source of health care information. It has also helped us re-imagine the traditional online news room experience and turn it into a truly new and innovative way to serve the needs of both journalists and our community.”

IABC’s Silver Quill awards honor the dedication, innovation and passion of communicators on a global scale. Each entry is scored independently by evaluators who judge the award submission on factors that include: stakeholder analysis, strategic and tactical planning, quality of execution and measurable results.

Since launching in March 2021, the "Our Experts" media database has received more than 20,000 online visits and has resulted in more than 200 news stories.

“We are honored to earn this Silver Quill Award with our client, ChristianaCare,” said Peter Evans, CEO of ExpertFile. “Despite the pressures of the pandemic, their team collaborated closely with us to create a world-class program that continues to help a variety of audiences discover and connect every day with credible medical experts and groundbreaking research.”

Powered by the ExpertFile software platform, the ChristianaCare “Our Experts” site provides a digital media toolkit with advanced search/digital content features to help journalists discover experts and access resources that make it easier for them to complete stories and meet their deadlines.

Awarding top honors “with distinction,” the IABC judging panel provided a number of detailed comments on the “ChristianaCare Experts Program”:

• “Very well-done website. Nice content that is well organized and searchable. From planning and implementation to measurement afterward the program shows great work.”
• “Great work in the time of COVID. Your knowledge of journalists and their challenges. during COVID was spot-on.”
• “I liked the media advisories. Having been on both sides of the reporter/media relations thing, I like clear and simple. You achieved this!”
• “If I were a reporter, the advisory would be invaluable when I needed an expert.”
• “Very specific and focused on business-results. Great work here.”
• “Very comprehensive! You thought of everything without getting bogged down in unnecessary details.”

Nearly 100 ChristianaCare experts are featured in the database today, and that number continues to grow.

“As communicators in health care, it has always been important for us to provide timely, accurate, easy-to-understand information to the communities we serve so that people can make informed decisions about their health,” said Karen Browne, vice president of marketing and communications at ChristianaCare. “The COVID-19 pandemic added an entirely new level of urgency to our role as communicators, and it made it even more important for us to build strong relationships with our partners in the news media so that they can deliver compelling, actionable health information to the community—from experts they can trust.”

The pandemic also highlighted the need to do more with less. ChristianaCare’s innovation was driven out of a desire to improve the reach, impact and efficiency of its media relations efforts—amid rapidly increasing demand—without the need to add additional resources.

“With our partners at ExpertFile, we leveraged ExpertFile’s outstanding technology platform to create a database of our experts that helps reporters and news producers find the sources they need quickly, and it enables our team to nimbly manage their requests and facilitate interviews in a way that makes the absolute best use of our resources,” Hoffman said. “The ExpertFile team worked as our strategic thought partners throughout this process, and they’ve really embraced our desire for innovation that drives results. They’ve helped us to work smarter and do more without adding a lot of additional resources. Together, we’ve built a system and process that is helping us to communicate in new and better ways—and we’re just getting started.”

About ChristianaCare

Headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, ChristianaCare is one of the country’s most dynamic health care organizations, centered on improving health outcomes, making high-quality care more accessible and lowering health care costs. ChristianaCare includes an extensive network of primary care and outpatient services, home health care, urgent care centers, three hospitals (1,299 beds), a freestanding emergency department, a Level I trauma center and a Level III neonatal intensive care unit, a comprehensive stroke center and regional centers of excellence in heart and vascular care, cancer care and women’s health. It also includes the pioneering Gene Editing Institute.

ChristianaCare is nationally recognized as a great place to work, rated by Forbes as the 2nd best health system for diversity and inclusion, and the 29th best health system to work for in the United States, and by IDG Computerworld as one of the nation’s Best Places to Work in IT. ChristianaCare is rated by Healthgrades as one of America’s 50 Best Hospitals and continually ranked among the nation’s best by U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek and other national quality ratings. ChristianaCare is a nonprofit teaching health system with more than 260 residents and fellows. With its groundbreaking Center for Virtual Health and a focus on population health and value-based care, ChristianaCare is shaping the future of health care.