// By Jane Weber Brubaker // Patients don’t make allowances for healthcare. They expect to have the same seamless, integrated digital experience they have using Amazon Prime or Uber when they interact with their health system or provider. “That ease of mobility is what’s important to them,” says Pamela Landis, Vice President of Information Services Read More
Ask the Expert, with Adam Dorfman // By Jane Weber Brubaker // Adam Dorfman is Senior Vice President of Product and Technology at SIM Partners, a technology provider that optimizes location-specific content and business information to enhance local, mobile, and social search results. “Healthcare systems sometimes have thousands of physicians and hundreds of clinics and Read More
// By Joel Philippsen // Video storytelling skills are developed over time. There are a lot of variables, and regardless of how much you prepare, don’t expect to get it completely right your first time. Over the years I’ve found techniques and situations that work well and others that don’t work out so well. The Read More
// By Jane Weber Brubaker // Jack Banks is on the facilities staff of Columbus Regional Health. “One day during his lunch break he had a pulmonary embolism here at the hospital and he collapsed,” says Joel Philippsen, Digital Marketing Coordinator at Columbus Regional Health. In the video that follows, produced by Philippsen, Jack shares Read More
Hint: It’s not taking up a new hobby. // By Dagmara Scalise // So, the website redesign you and your team have been consumed by for the past year or two is finally finished and launched. Congratulations. Take a few minutes to bask in the glow of your well-deserved success. A redesign is an enormous Read More
// By Jane Weber Brubaker // Is the whole equal to the sum of its parts, or greater than the sum of its parts? Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN) is banking on the latter as it prepares to roll out fully integrated physician relationship management (PRM) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems from Evariant this Read More
// By Daniel Fell // One of the most important things marketers and digital strategists can do is align their digital activities with marketing and organizational business goals. But often, in the urgency to adopt these new technologies and move projects forward, good strategic thinking can take a back seat to just getting things done. Read More
// Ask the Expert, with Allen Gottfried // If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much more is video worth? We are visual, and moving images capture our attention. More than 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube. Video is becoming the preferred method of information consumption for many. Last Read More
// By Jane Weber Brubaker // Two years ago, Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare launched its new website, mywheaton.org, built on Geonetric’s VitalSite CMS (content management system). One of the top priorities of the redesign was to make it easier for visitors to find physicians, choose physicians, and request appointments. “Before we redesigned our site, I would Read More
// By James A. Gardner // When you think of using social media to conduct groundbreaking customer research, a hospital probably isn’t the first place you’d look. But the Computational Epidemiology Group in the Boston Children’s Hospital’s Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) is a leader in mining social channels for health-related insights. It is now Read More
// By Jen Jenkins and Kelley Whalen // Chances are your system is using Pinterest—but are you getting the most out of it? Why should you care about maintaining yet another social media platform? Is it worth the effort? At University of Utah Health Care, we think it is. Check out some of these statistics Read More
// By Chris Behan // With so many healthcare organizations planning or undergoing major website redesigns, the need for expert guidance to ensure success has never been greater. We asked Web content and search engine optimization expert Chris Behan, President and Founder of Socius Marketing, to weigh in on some of the potential pitfalls, and Read More
// By Ken Rickard // Imagine a healthcare world in which you had to pay a license fee to perform each angioplasty. Or one in which breakthroughs in cancer treatments were never published, but were instead reserved only for a select few doctors and institutions. Medicine, like science, depends on the free exchange of information Read More
// By Jane Weber Brubaker // “The best way to change a culture is to be transparent,” says Emily Kagan Trenchard, Associate Vice President of Digital Strategy at Northwell Health (formerly North Shore-LIJ). “When you pull back the curtain, everyone wants to tidy up the room.” Kagan Trenchard and co-presenter Chris Boyer, Senior Vice President Read More
// By Emily Kagan Trenchard // We’re lucky enough to live in an era when design is no longer viewed as decoration. We understand it as a core principle that shapes our everyday interaction—from how we answer the smartphone in our pocket, to how we pay for things with a swipe of a card. We Read More
// By Jane Weber Brubaker // Rome wasn’t built in a day. It grew one conquest at a time. With so many major changes occurring in every aspect of healthcare, health systems today are advancing into new realms and evolving new models to better serve constituents. Change is the only constant. Before one major project Read More
// By Jane Weber Brubaker // The social media budget at Orlando Health will double next year. But the health system’s social media strategy was anything but robust four years ago when Chantal Stephens came on board as Director of Marketing and Physician Sales. “Social media at the time was a very small part of Read More
// By Jane Weber Brubaker // What makes a story great? It is relevant. It is original. It is simple to understand and retell. It is easy to share. It builds on feelings and values. It often ties into a bigger story. It gives your audience an opportunity to create or add to the story. Read More
// By Jane Weber Brubaker // Social media has become a critical component of the digital marketing mix for most healthcare organizations. Social media command centers are making it possible for lean marketing teams to listen, respond, and engage with growing numbers of consumers on multiple platforms, and share information across the organization. Some command Read More
Ask the Expert, with Scott Mowery, Director of Digital Services at Cleveland Clinic // By Jane Weber Brubaker // Scott Mowery, Director of Digital Services at Cleveland Clinic, presented at HCIC 2015. His background in e-commerce intrigued us. We wanted to know how it shaped his approach to digital marketing in healthcare. We also wanted Read More
// By Jane Weber Brubaker // In March, we spoke with Sheree Esser, Consumer Engagement Marketing Manager at Trinity Health, about a planned marketing automation pilot at Saint Alphonsus in Boise, Idaho. We followed up with Esser to find out the results of the pilot. The purpose of the pilot was to see if email Read More
// By Jane Weber Brubaker // The CEO of Kindred Hospital in Mansfield, Texas was concerned. A patient and the patient’s family member had previously committed to coming to the facility. “Then they went online, and they read the reviews, and they came back and told [the facility] that they were not coming any longer,” Read More
To say that the past couple of years at Nebraska Medicine have been a busy time would be an understatement. As if launching a new name and brand weren’t enough, Nebraska Medicine completed the clinical integration of three separate entities into one operating unit, all while dealing with the international press as one of three Read More
We at Plain-English Media extend our congratulations to the winners of the 2015 eHealthcare Leadership Awards. Presented by Health Care Communications, Rye, NY, the eHealthcare Leadership Awards program recognizes the very best websites and digital communications efforts of a wide range of healthcare organizations. The winners were announced today at a special presentation in Orlando, Read More
// By Dan Dunlop // Think about how you act when you host a dinner party. You are strategic when you develop the guest list, and bring people together who have commonalities. You greet people as they arrive and introduce them to others. And you facilitate conversation by suggesting interesting topics and by filling in Read More