Member Benefits

Join AHCJ or renew today!

Training

  • Annual conferences offer prominent speakers, provide concrete story ideas and offer opportunities for networking.

  • Regional seminars that move around the country and focus on such issues as rural health, big data in health care, and the business of health care.

  • An extensive array of fellowship programs that provide training, support and mentoring. These include two yearlong offerings: the AHCJ Regional Health Journalism Fellowship, which focuses on selected journalists from a specific region of the country and the AHCJ Reporting Fellowships on Health Care Performance, which give reporters the training and resources to examine the quality of health-care systems.

  • Shorter fellowship programs, such as a week at the CDC and a week at the National Institutes of Health learning about medical research.

  • Conference-oriented fellowships to aid journalists in attending our largest annual event.

Resources

  • The AHCJ website has a wealth of useful information that is updated regularly. Members have exclusive access to tip sheets, entries to our Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism contest, job postings, back issues of our newsletter HealthBeat and a special section for freelancers. We also have extensive pages devoted to topics vital for every health reporter, including medical research, social determinants, insurance, health reform, aging and oral health.

  • Updated weekly, the Covering Health blog is your link to the latest news in the field, story ideas, hot headlines, new reports and tools to use in your reporting and noteworthy stories.

  • Our newsletter, HealthBeat, is published twice a year. 

  • AHCJ members receive a 20% discount on one single-user subscription to AP Stylebook Online each year.

  • LexisNexis discount: Through a partnership with The Hatch Institute, AHCJ can offer significantly discounted access to LexisNexis to aid in your research. LexisNexis is a vital resource for all types of journalists and writers, but it's particularly valuable for those covering health care in that it contains some 250 industry publications, including the American Journal of Public Health, The Lancet, Biotech Business, Modern Healthcare and Occupational Health.

  • Free access to journals and databases, including:

    • Wiley Online Library: AHCJ has arranged expanded access to the global research and learning company, John Wiley and Sons. Along with the important resource of the Cochrane Library our members have come to trust, you will now have access to all health science titles published on Wiley Online Library. With this benefit, you can read millions of articles from more than 1,500 journals, including the Cochrane Library, Cancer, Journal of the American Heart Association and more. Learn more.

    • Doximity: In collaboration with U.S. News & World Report, Doximity offers the first comprehensive national research on residency programs. It includes rankings calculated using a combination of aggregate public sources and Doximity network data. You can research detailed information on 3,600 residency programs including board pass rate, subspecialization rate, alumni distribution and feeder med schools.

    • Elsevier's ClinicalKey and ScienceDirect: ClinicalKey is the world’s first Clinical Insight Engine that lets you take advantage of the world’s largest online database of science, technical and medical information with ScienceDirect. Read more...

    • UpToDate.com is an electronic medical information resource with detailed information about the epidemiology, pathophysiology, diagnosis, and treatment of most medical conditions. Content is created, reviewed and updated by more than 5,100 physician authors and editors. Normally, individual subscriptions run up to $499 a year. Read more about UpToDate...

    • Annual Reviews, which publishes reviews in more than 40 focused disciplines within the biomedical, life, physical and social sciences. Annual Reviews journals are among the most highly cited in scientific literature as indexed by the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports®. This would cost thousands of dollars if you signed up on your own. Read more about what Annual Reviews offers.

    • Health Affairs, the respected health policy journal (a $125 value!). Read more about what Health Affairs offers.

    • American Journal of Public Health, dedicated to original work in research, research methods, and program evaluation in the field of public health. (a $200 value!). Read more about what the American Journal of Public Health offers.

    • The JAMA Network and its 12 journals. Read more about what the JAMA Network offers.

    • The Medical Letter provides critical appraisals of new prescription drugs and comparative reviews of drugs for common diseases.

      Sign up for journals, systematic reviews and databases here. (Be aware, some journals require an individual review before access is granted.)

Networking

  • Our email discussion list is a private service for journalists who are professional or associate members where they can hold ongoing discussions, seek help with a story and request information. You can select to receive each message as it is sent or a digest, which sends several messages at a time. (Note: Allied members are not eligible for the email discussion list.)

  • Social networking on LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as an active presence on Twitter.

  • Local chapters: Check out where we have concentrations of AHCJ members who hold events.

  • A calendar of events, including training opportunities, news briefings and more.

  • Meeting expert speakers and approved exhibitors at our conferences allows you to expand your source list, and your story potential.

  • Members can opt to be listed in a searchable membership directory that is available only to current AHCJ members.

Career development

AHCJ Mentorship Program

  • Are you looking for career advice? Managing up in your newsroom? How to lead with influence in a newsroom where you don’t have any direct reports? Or are you wanting to impart your knowledge, expertise and seasoned advice to early-career journalists?
  • Signups are now open for the new mentorship networking program at Health Journalism 2023 in St. Louis.
    • If you’re joining us for HJ23, sign up for the mentorship breakfast here. If you can’t make it to St. Louis, but are still interested in being connected to a mentor or mentee, please also fill out this form and indicate that you are not registered for the conference.
    • AHCJ will match mentors with mentees and arrange for them to meet at a breakfast during the conference. The AHCJ mentorship breakfast will be held from 7:15 - 8:30 a.m. on Friday, March 10, at the conference hotel.
    • Space is limited, and the deadline to apply is midnight CT on Wednesday, Feb. 22. If the slots are filled before then, your application will be added to a waitlist. Please also note that you must register for the conference by Feb. 17 in order to participate.

Advocacy

  • We advocate for transparency, openness and responsiveness by government and private-sector officials.

  • We help members raise concerns to government officials who seem to ignore them.

  • We partner with other journalism groups to write letters and op-eds about important journalism issues of the day.

  • We have a clear set of journalism ethics.

 

The AHCJ staff is always happy to lend assistance to our members. The office staff's regular working hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. central time, Monday through Friday. Feel free to e-mail or call with questions or comments. 

Join AHCJ or renew today!