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
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
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 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
by Jennifer Busick In an episode of the TV series “Northern Exposure,” the fictional Alaskan hamlet of Cicely is tapped to participate in a drug trial. Residents line up to collect bottles of identical pills, one of which is an investigational new drug that may (or may not) prevent the common cold; the other, of Read More
by Ted Balowski Having an effective Web presence is critically important for a hospital or healthcare organization, but how should that presence appear for a brand with more than one location? Is it a good idea for a brand with multiple locations or offerings to consolidate efforts? In the past decade, there have been profound Read More
by Lin Grensing-Pophal While there are still those who believe Pinterest is just a site to save pretty pictures, some users are getting creative in practical ways and finding that Pinterest is more than just a “pretty page.” Medical practices are on the list. They’re using Pinterest for everything from patient and provider education to Read More
by Mike Maloney and Katrina VanTyne In 2012, Google published a landmark study about the hospital selection process, “The Digital Journey to Wellness.” According to the study, 75 percent of searches by prospective patients revolve around four specific areas: conditions, diseases, symptoms, and departments. Our web team at Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington, VT, Read More
by Sheryl S. Jackson Proactive Planning and Simulating a Situation Prepare Social Media Managers Healthcare organizations may not have moved as quickly to adopt social media as other industries, but of the 1,562 hospitals self-reporting social media use, 1,300 hospitals have Facebook pages, 1,005 have Twitter accounts, and 1,084 use Foursquare, according to the Social Read More
by Theresa Jacobellis Jacobellis It’s a hospital media person’s dream: a major news stor with a healthcare angle breaks, and your hospital happens to employ the nation’s foremost expert on the subject. Unfortunately, unless you are located in New York, Atlanta, or another major market, your chances of landing an interview with a national news Read More
by Neal Linkon When they visited, my parents were always surprised at how much my kids had changed. I hardly noticed because I saw them every day. Now that I’m back in healthcare, I feel like my parents. I was away for more than three years. When I came back a year ago, it felt Read More
RESOURCES Social Media Analytics Tools Adopted by 61 Percent of Marketers, finds a study conducted by Demand Metric and sponsored by NetBase. The major cited uses of analytics were for campaign tracking (60 percent), brand analysis (48 percent), competitive intelligence (40 percent), and customer care (36 percent). Other key findings in the study were: Social Read More
by Mark S. Gothberg “People always talk about how great Amazon.com is and how all websites should be like it. But a healthcare site shouldn’t be like Amazon, where a consumer buys a book and then browses the site for other things of interest to buy. People have very specific interests in healthcare, and a Read More
by Mark S. Gothberg “We have to keep in mind … that we must bring value to the organization. To do that, we have to identify our goals and keep track of our results. The use of social networks is no different from our other marketing tools – they must deliver a concrete, measurable contribution,” Read More
Ask The Expert with Ted Balowski With the healthcare Web environment rapidly changing, new technologies are constantly emerging and are being adopted in varying degrees by demographic target groups. Now, four generations have unprecedented access to healthcare information and the providers that deliver it. According to a 2013 survey by Econsultancy, four in 10 global Read More
Ask The Expert with Mark S. Gothberg Winners of the 2013 eHealthcare Leadership Awards, the competition’s 14th year, were recognized in November in New Orleans during a presentation at a healthcare Internet conference sponsored by Atlanta-based Greystone.Net. The November issue of eHealthcare Strategy & Trends listed the winners. Last month’s “Ask the Expert” column discussed Read More
Ask The Expert with Mark S. Gothberg Key provisions of the Affordable Care Act will be in full force on January 1 – less than two months away. Millions of newly insured consumers will be seeking health services, with many of them having limited knowledge of how the healthcare system works or the providers serving Read More
by Mark S. Gothberg Conventional Thinking Often Wrong With its total national awareness far below that of Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins Medicine, Cleveland Clinic decided to take a novel approach to building the brand. In March 2012, Cleveland Clinic launched Health Hub, a site very different from the organization’s primary website at www.clevelandclinic.org, and Read More
Facebook introduced hashtags on its news feed in June with the expectation that they would increase reach. But a study by EdgeRank Checker finds that hashtags didn’t increase exposure at all. Posts with hashtags actually had less viral reach. Also, posts with hashtags had a lower level of engagement, and organic reach exhibited a slight Read More
WEBSITES/MOBILE APPLICATIONS Concussion Recognition App Now Available for Free. The popular Concussion Recognition & Response app from PAR is available at the Apple App Store and at Google Play for Android devices. New Symptom Checker Identifies Conditions Caused by Drugs. The free personalized symptom checker from eHealthMe compares symptoms with more than 40 million drug Read More
// By Lyle Green and Dan Dunlop // In May 2013, a group of physician relations professionals and thought leaders gathered in Houston to develop a vision for the future of physician relations. Recognizing the growing adoption of digital media by medical professionals, the assembled experts sought to define the future role of the physician Read More