Patient engagement is the Holy Grail of healthcare. The theory is if patients take an active role in managing and maintaining their health, they will reap the benefits, staying healthier, spending less, and costing the system less. One way to get and keep patients engaged is through patient portals. But how do you get them Read More
eHealthcare Pulse In 2010, 100 primary care physicians affiliated with three health systems agreed to explore the impact of sharing clinical notes with patients in a project dubbed OpenNotes. The total panel for the initial trial was 20,000 patients from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, and Harborview Medical Read More
As if there weren’t enough pressures on providers and health systems, now they have to worry about competition from retail health clinics. Attention-grabbing headlines like this one from Forbes makes you wonder where all this is leading: “Healthcare for $4: Are You Ready For Wal-Mart To Be Your Doctor?” Health clinics operated by drugstore chains Read More
Piedmont Healthcare in Atlanta and digital marketing solutions provider BrightWhistle were featured in our January article “Building a Facebook Community Creates Marketing Opportunities for Atlanta’s Piedmont Healthcare.” The article was based on a presentation at the 2014 Healthcare Internet Conference (HCIC) given by Matt Gove, CMO at Piedmont and Michael Sengbusch CTO at BrightWhistle. We Read More
Late last year, Facebook announced on its blog, “Pages that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time.” In a related post on the same day, Facebook assured businesses that, “Pages still matter — a lot,” and for emphasis, added, “In October, for instance, nearly a billion people visited Facebook Read More
Ask the Expert with Ben Dillon In a recent discussion on the SHSMD list serv, a member asked: “For those of you with more than one hospital and/or multiple facilities…are there multiple Facebook pages for each hospital or do you consolidate your Facebook presence into one location? Do you also have service line or departmental Read More
If your service area covers three states, and your health system’s name only includes one state, it’s time for a change. That’s what Iowa Health System concluded in 2013 when it changed its name to UnityPoint Health. The change was more than just a solution to a geographic misnomer. It represented an overhaul of the Read More
If you Google “deadly cancers” you’ll probably find a link to the Top Five Most Dangerous Cancers in Men and Women on page one of the search results page. The article and infographic was posted by Iowa-based UnityPoint Health, the fourth largest nondenominational health system in the U.S. UnityPoint has been busy optimizing its website Read More
You never know which posts are going to get people’s attention on LinkedIn. Michael Yoder, Social Media Consultant at Spectrum Health was pleasantly surprised by the results of this post: The post generated 14,000 impressions and 300 clicks. Many hospitals effectively use LinkedIn as an extension of their efforts to recruit in-demand health care professionals—and Read More
By Spencer Hunt What’s the best strategy for hospitals using LinkedIn? Consider these two examples. The updates Vanderbilt University Medical Center posts on its LinkedIn page frequently congratulate doctors on their awards and promotions. Advances in malaria and scoliosis research are celebrated, and job openings at the Nashville hospital—particularly for nurses—are featured. Almost 500 miles Read More
It would be a big upgrade to have your branded hospital app available for download in the iTunes or Google Play app stores. But how do you build a native app for Apple and Android devices? If your hospital is like most, you don’t have that expertise in house. The Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Read More
When the program manager for the Executive Health program at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH) came to Andrew Quinn, Interactive Marketing Director, and asked him to put the program’s printable exercise guide up on the website, Quinn suggested a different approach, a mobile solution. “Everyone has smart phones these days, especially this particular Read More
By Cheryl L. Serra A person could get plenty lost in the maze of a ten-story, one-million-square-foot new building addition. But leaders at University Health System (UHS) in San Antonio, TX acted quickly to make sure that didn’t happen. They teamed with Etelu to develop a wayfinding application (app) that helps patients, visitors, and staff Read More
By Lisa D. Ellis How can one health system communicate most effectively with thousands of employees who work in different locations and on different schedules? This was the challenge recently facing Scripps Health, an integrated nonprofit health network in the San Diego area that has more than 14,000 employees working at five hospitals, 28 clinics, Read More
By Sheryl S. Jackson Online appointment request forms are not a new idea. In fact, physician offices and hospitals have incorporated them into their website design as one way to increase convenience to patients. At Barnes-Jewish Hospital (BJH), however, a strategic approach to information or appointment request forms has proven to be an effective marketing Read More
By Ed Lamb Memorial University Medical Center appears to have answered the question of how few full-time employees a large regional health system needs to maintain a comprehensive website, active accounts on all major social media platforms and a digital marketing program that produces impressive returns on investments. The number is two, with neither working Read More
A growing percentage of the U.S. population does not speak English – greater than 35% in some states. How can hospitals and health systems cope with this potential safety issue? How does a teenager tell his doctor he has a “dolor de estómago” (stomach ache) if the doctor doesn’t speak Spanish? If an elderly woman Read More
By Lisa D. Ellis The latest technological approaches are helping healthcare facilities do their job better—and more efficiently—than ever before, right down to the very last detail. In fact, that’s where Video Remote Interpreting (VRI) comes in, offering on-demand video interpretation services to facilitate accurate communication for patients who are hearing impaired or have language Read More
by Ed Lamb “When you have a Facebook post that is generating good organic engagement, putting a little money behind it can really produce great results.” Amanda Mauck, the Digital Marketing Manager for Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, and her chief consultant partner at Social Innovation, Lannie Byrd, shared this insight in separate interviews with eHealthcare Read More
// By Ed Lamb // Piedmont Healthcare, a full-service health system based in Atlanta, GA, currently directs about 10 percent of its annual marketing budget to social media outreach. While that commitment of advertising dollars to creating messages for Facebook, Twitter, and other digital networks already far outstrips the average of 2 percent across the Read More
// by Grace Jones // Starting a hospital blog can often seem like a daunting task. What should we name the blog? What topics should it be about? Who is our audience? How often should we post? These are all good questions to ask when starting a blog. Yet none of them matters if you Read More
by Jennifer Redmond Only in this day and age would a high school student’s tweets garner the attention of White House staffers and earn a spot in national headlines. But that’s exactly what happened as the hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama made its way up the trending charts in mid-November 2014. Accompanying the sardonic hashtag were unappealing photos Read More
by Peter Hochstein Lynn Ricci faces a problem that many hospital marketers might wish for. At the Hospital for Special Care (HSC) in New Britain, CT, where Ricci is Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, patient traffic for a recently added autism center is growing so fast that the hospital is scrambling to keep Read More
by Joan Trezek “I changed doctors because we just weren’t communicating.” “I really like my doctor; I feel like I’m important and being listened to.” While phrases like patient engagement and shared decision making weren’t much in evidence a few years ago, they are very popular in today’s healthcare environment, where comments from both ends Read More
by Dan Fredricks Humans are absolute social beings. We have evolved this trait over hundreds of millennia to ensure our success in the two major aspects of life—survival and reproduction. Understanding that we have been hardwired by evolution to be profoundly social is a major advantage to healthcare marketers. This knowledge will enable you to Read More