Free Weekly Ezine from eHealthcare Strategy & Trends

Chris Boyer on the Power of Personalized Marketing

Chris Boyer, director of digital and analytics at University of Minnesota Health and Fairview Health

We interviewed Chris Boyer, Senior Vice President, Digital at ReviveHealth, following his presentation with Chris Bevolo, EVP at ReviveHealth, at this year’s Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit. Their presentation “Personalized Marketing: Moving From Persona to Person” offers a vision of what healthcare marketing can become with the right strategies, competencies, tools, and technologies. Where is Read More

Mayo Clinic Shares Healthcare Social Media Best Practices

Mayo Clinic Logo

“Dr. Will and Dr. Charlie Mayo were our first social networkers,” says Lee Aase, Director of Mayo Clinic Social Media Network. “They really believed that to do the best care for patients, they needed to learn from others, and they felt an obligation to share what they were learning in their practice.” The Mayo Clinic Social Media Read More

You Don’t Offer Online Appointment Scheduling? You’re Leaving Money on the Table

Penn thumbnail logo

In our self-service, digitally enabled world, healthcare consumers get annoyed when they can’t do something as basic as scheduling an appointment online. Ignoring patient demands for access and convenience can be a costly mistake, resulting in low satisfaction scores, or worse, losing out to competitors. A few years ago, Clinical Care Associates (CCA) decided it was time Read More

#HCSM: How (and Why) To Get Your Doctors Tweeting

Kathy Wilets, Director of Public Relations and Content Marketing, UUHC

Do you have a hard time getting your physicians to tweet or blog or post anything at all on social media? So did University of Utah Health Care (UUHC) before the organization found a way to crack the code. “I’m not going to lie, most of them needed some convincing,” says Libby Mitchell, Social Media Read More

What Do Customers Hate About Your Hospital’s Website?

Are your website visitors captive customers? When an organization fails to meet customer expectations—and the bar has been set high by industries outside of healthcare—the impact on brand can be great. More than a third of visitors to health system websites surveyed by Greystone.Net and Klein & Partners, creators of gSight™, a healthcare and hospital Read More

Loyalty and Rewards Programs in Healthcare Marketing: A Trend To Watch

Jane Weber Brubaker, Editor of eHealthcare Strategy & Trends

A March 2016 editorial in JAMA authored by three University of Michigan physicians, “Health System Loyalty Programs: An Innovation in Customer Care and Service,” begins as follows: “Many people belong to loyalty programs for coffee shops, hotel chains, or airlines. Despite a highly consumer-oriented approach in some health systems, similar types of loyalty programs have Read More

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality in Healthcare: Keep Watching

Pokemon Go

“If talk of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) brings to mind comically unfashionable goggles, a dearth of useful applications, and headache-inducing graphics, we’d understand. Until two or three years ago, we thought the same—they were technologies of the future and always would be. But we’ve come full circle in our thinking and so Read More

Align Your Physician Referrals To Boost Your Bottom Line

Lifepoint Health Logo

If you could get a physician to refer 100 percent of his or her patients to your hospital or health system, what would that be worth? If the physician refers to specialists, such as neurosurgeons or orthopedic surgeons, it could be worth $2.5 million to $3 million in annual revenue, according to Bryce Bartel, CEO Read More

How To Fast-Track a Digital Campaign Launch

Toni-Lynn Hansen, Director of Interactive Communications, Lahey Health

Could your health system launch a brand-new digital marketing campaign on four weeks’ notice? When funding for a marketing campaign materialized in the fall of 2015, Lahey Health’s Specializing in You campaign was fast-tracked, with a mandate to be in market by October 1. “The first email I got from our [marketing and communications] team Read More

Leverage Retail Strategies To Drive Your Healthcare Business

Ken Robbins

Is retail strategy relevant to your work as a healthcare marketer? The answer is a resounding yes, according to Ken Robbins, Founder and President of award-winning digital agency Response Mine Interactive (RMI). “Techniques used to increase conversions for larger retail organizations can be very successfully applied to healthcare,” he says. He offers the following stats in support Read More

Where Is Healthcare Marketing Headed In 2020 and Beyond?

Sanjay Dholakia, Chief Marketing Officer of Marketo

In early April, the Economist Intelligence Unit released results of its latest survey of top marketing executives, The Path to 2020: Marketers Seize the Customer Experience, commissioned by marketing automation company Marketo. The report captures the insights and opinions of global marketing leaders spanning multiple industries. We followed up with Marketo’s Chief Marketing Officer Sanjay Read More

Is Your Healthcare Organization at Risk of a Cyber Attack on Your PHI?

Suni Munshani

“Massive amounts of private health information (PHI) are stored in Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) ready for analysis by those in the healthcare industry for the benefit of all,” notes Suni Munshani. “[But] the healthcare industry must find new ways to defend itself and its sensitive data from bad actors also keen to leverage the wealth Read More

Keys To Selecting the Right Technology Vendor

Greystone.net logo square

When it comes to selecting software, implementation, or design vendors for major technology upgrades such as a content management system (CMS) or customer relationship management system (CRM), there’s a lot on the line. Even small healthcare organizations may have to pony up hundreds of thousands of dollars; for larger organizations, it could be in the Read More

Online Billing Patients Love (Not Merely Tolerate)

Online billing: From the patient perspective, it seems like the best you can achieve is a silver lining to an otherwise dark cloud. But Memorial Hermann health system in Texas has implemented an online payment solution from Simplee that is garnering rave reviews. “We understand that paying a healthcare bill isn’t always pleasant, that healthcare is Read More

Messaging App Boosts Patient Satisfaction Scores to 97.5 Percent

Patrick de la Roza

Recently, eHST Editor Jane Weber Brubaker spoke with Patrick de la Roza, CEO of EASE Applications, to learn more about an application credited with raising patient satisfaction scores from 80 percent to 97.5 percent at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio. “EASE” is an acronym for Electronic Access to Surgical Events. The EASE app is essentially a secure Read More

How To Rank #1 for Cancer Care: Best Practices for Healthcare SEO

“An ever-increasing number of consumers search the Internet for medical and health information, and within healthcare, as in many industries, there is fierce competition for search traffic,” observes Marlene Kurban, a business development consultant and freelance writer with more than 20 years of experience in the behavioral healthcare field. “A targeted SEO strategy, combined with relevant, Read More

Which User Testing Tool Is Right For You?

Bill Citro, Communications and Marketing Senior Analyst at Nebraska Medicine

You’ve been working on your website redesign for many months. At key points along the way you solicited feedback from your physician committee and other stakeholders in your organization. Now you’re finally ready to let internal users test the site before the public launch. What are the right tools to use to get user feedback? Read More

Case Study: Patient Engagement is a Two-Way Street

Pamela Landis, vice president of digital engagement, Hackensack Meridian Health

Patients have high expectations for their online health care experiences these days. They expect to have the same seamless, integrated digital interaction they enjoy with Amazon Prime or Uber when they interact with their health system or provider. “Ease of mobility is what’s important to them,” says Pamela Landis, Vice President of Information Services at Read More

Why You Must Continually Improve Your Local Search Results

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 hospitals. They are very complicated systems,” says Dorfman. As healthcare organizations acquire Read More

Take Two: Improve Your Video Storytelling Skills

Joel Philippsen, Digital Marketing Coordinator at Columbus Regional Health, believes in learning from his mistakes. “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 Read More

Your Website Redesign Is Just the Beginning: What To Do Next

Dagmara Scalise, AVP strategic services and healthcare practice lead, Primacy

The website redesign that has utterly consumed you and your team for the past year (or more) is finally completed. What now? While you should take some time to step back and bask in your success, says Dagmara Scalise of full-service digital agency Primacy, there’s still a lot to do. “Your website is the foundation of your Read More

Fully Integrated PRM and CRM = Fully Leveraged Healthcare Marketing

Ever dream of driving a Ferrari? If you’re a health system, the equivalent is a completely tricked-out, customized, integrated technology platform that gives you all the information you need to tackle your market holistically. No more siloed B-to-B vs. B-to-C strategies. Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN) is living this dream as it prepares to roll Read More