Guidelines for Contributors

The Prepared Patient Forum (PPF) is owned and managed by the Center for Advancing Health (CFAH). We welcome blog and column contributions from our readers. If you prefer to contribute anonymously, you may use a pseudonym. However, if you use a pseudonym, you must disclose your name to the site administrators, and we will keep your identity confidential. If you contribute to PPF and wish to use your own name, PPF will publish your blog or column with the appropriate attribution in the by-line. Please tell us how you could like your by-line to appear when you submit your blog (i.e. author, affiliation/occupation/perspective). We would also like to provide a link to your biography whenever possible. Please submit the link to your biography and your picture along with your contribution.

PPF is a place for people who are looking for information and resources about how to find and use safe, decent health care. We ask that your contributions be relevant to this audience. We prefer to publish blogs and columns written in the first person; we want our content to be based on personal experiences. So, if you contribute as a professional, or an expert, please use references to recent health news stories that connect with a personal experience and/or concern.

Please send us contributions in .txt or .rtf format. We will also accept Word submissions. If you submit your contribution as an attachment to an email, we may ask that your resubmit if attributions and formats are not clear.

PPF retains the right to accept or refuse to publish any article, blog or column submitted to our administrators. PPF will not publish anything without your consent, but we assume that what's been sent to us for publishing is ours to post and repost as we see fit.

Please use these editorial tips:

Posts should be 700 words or less. People on the PPF website are looking for information that will help them make good choices about health and health care. But, unlike most of us, they don't spend their days researching health and health care stuff. They need the right information at the right time so that they can get back to their lives. So, make your posts short, relevant, and helpful to patients and people who have day-jobs. If your posts are longer than 700 words, we may ask you to trim them.

Avoid "inside baseball" references. That means try to use terms, language and reference points that lay people and patients will understand. Avoid acronyms whenever possible, and if you must use them, try to hyperlink them to the appropriate reference on the web. You can also use this trick when you're citing reports, newspaper articles, and other sources.

Our administrators may follow up with you about ways to improve your submission or speak to our readers. Our editors reserve the right to make changes to your contributions to correct your grammar, spelling and punctuation. Please don't be offended.

Please submit your contributions to:

Dorothy Jeffress, Executive Director, Center for Advancing Health, at djeffress@cfah.org

With a carbon copy ("CC") to:

Brandon Moore, Director of New Media, Center for Advancing Health, at bmoore@cfah.org