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Elaine Mann

New position: President, KidCare Medical Television Network, Tampa

By FRED W. WRIGHT
Published April 24, 2006

Previous position: President, WordSmiths International, Dunedin

Starting a television network with a health care focus is an ideal culmination of skills for Elaine Mann. As the president of the new KidCare Medical Television Network, one of three divisions of Medical Media Television of Tampa, Mann will be creating streaming video that will go right into the offices of pediatricians around the country.

"We do educational, informational programs," Mann said. Segments of four to seven minutes long will be created to educate parents while at the pediatrician's office. The segments will be video streamed into donated monitors at participating pediatricians' offices.

Topics will be "covering relevant health areas, topics, things parents may need to know or discuss with their pediatrician," Mann said.

Mann, who started March 1, said she is putting together the first scripts for an estimated 10 initial segments. Shooting should start in May, she said, at affiliated production facilities in Los Angeles. The first programs should be launched in late 2006, providing programming to 1,000 subscribers by January.

KidCare will target the estimated 60,000 pediatricians who belong to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Medical Media TV has two other divisions creating advertiser-sponsored programming for niche markets: PetCare Television Network, which provides programming on DVDs to veterinarians; and the African American Medical Network, which targets the offices of physicians with African-American patients, also on DVD.

By using video sent directly to pediatricians' offices, "it gives us a great opportunity to update programming and advertising as we need," Mann said. "Rather than having to produce (DVD) discs that go out once a month, we can do it at will."

Mann also will reach out to pediatricians around the country with details of the network and will build a division staff of a dozen or more.

Mann said she sees this role as a chance to work in an arena she has long enjoyed.

"First of all, I love media. I just like the interaction. I like the constant change and flux," she said. "Media has changed so much over even the last 20 years. In marketing, we've gone from the overall spread of the message out there and see who it hits to niche marketing. That's what we do. I think we're discovering that direct-to-consumer marketing will be the wave of the future."

A native of Kansas City, Mo., Mann worked for nearly a decade in the health care industry before attending college. She earned two degrees in four years - a bachelor's degree in 1997 with a major in business administration, and a master's degree in communication studies in 1999, both from the University of Missouri in Kansas City.

While working on her master's degree, Mann moved to Florida in 1998 to become director of corporate communications for Phil Cohen & Associates in Tampa. Two years later, she became president of WordSmiths International in Dunedin, a health care information organization.

"What I enjoy the most is the research and writing," Mann said. "This gives me a great opportunity to research very specific topics and things that are very important to people . . . and then have them come to fruition as on-air programming."

Mann, 42, is single and lives in Dunedin. She is a member of the incoming board of directors of the Dunedin North chapter of Rotary International and on the business recruitment and retention committee for the Clearwater Downtown Partnership.

In her spare time, Mann said, she collects cats. She has three. She said she also likes to vacation in California, near the Pacific Ocean.

"I'm an Aquarian," she said, referring to her astrological sign. "I love water."

[Last modified April 24, 2006, 01:40:15]