About Ben Dillon

Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

It’s not just Ben’s sultry radio-voice that makes him the perfect person to be Geonetric’s eHealth Evangelist, although we do believe that increases attendance to our webinars. It’s the fact that Ben’s a thought leader. He follows healthcare technology trends like other people follow sports teams. He’s constantly researching and analyzing everything from social media strategies to accountable care organizations and determining what it all means to Geonetric, our clients and the industry as a whole. This sought-after speaker and current SHSMD board member wasn’t always in the spotlight, previously working in business process re-engineering and software development with the University of Iowa Healthcare and the Michigan Insurance Bureau. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in eBusiness and strategic management from the University of Iowa. If you saw this man’s calendar you’d be very surprised to learn that in between all his trade rag interviews and speaking engagement prep he still finds time to feed his Twitter addiction and play the Big House with the University of Michigan Alumni marching band.

Brand Isn’t about Advertising, It’s about Experience

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Ben Dillon

Conferences like the Healthcare Marketing Strategy Summit that I attended this week are always part education, part commiseration and part inspiration. That last bit is typically the role of the keynotes – someone from outside the industry comes in, preferably with a recognizable name or at least a few recognizable highlights from their resume, and gets all the attendees re-energized and excited about what we can accomplish when we return to work.

Former Starbucks and Nike marketing guru and author of A New Brand World Scott Bedbury fit the bill.

Bedbury’s talk wasn’t about new ways to approach brand-building, rather it was to remind us of the fundamentals. Your employees are the single biggest component of your experience as a service organization. And when you compromise in hiring, fail to indoctrinate your staff or don’t focus on morale – it can destroy your brand in the blink of an eye.

Here’s Scott Bedbury’s list of 15 branding tips:

Remember that consumers are really not that into you.
Respect consumer’s intelligence, their time, and their experiences.
Respect what they’re feeling in the moment you connect with them.
Respect the spandex rule – just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Avoid looking like Sybil (Schizophrenics are entertaining but they’re hard to know or trust. Be consistent.)
You get what you pay for. Respect and reward those who help you.
Remember that 5% of humanity is crazy and that another 5% will never be satisfied with anything you do. (The customer is not always right.)
All brands need to be reinvented every now and then.
I truly don’t think there was a #9, but hey, maybe I just missed it!
It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
Find art in everything you do.
Sometimes you need to change course when it seems impossible.
Unleash the human potential of your organization.
Be fully present in the moments that matter most to those who matter most.
Have fun.

He also shared lots of fun videos from his time at Nike and Starbucks that reinforce these points. Videos like Nike’s Walt Stack ad.

The biggest takeaway for me – brand isn’t about advertising, it’s about experience. What you put on a billboard isn’t your brand. Your customers determine your brand based on the place, the people and the experience.

The Keys to Creating Great Content

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Ben Dillon

You know it was a great workshop when you took away so many great points you couldn’t even fit them all into one blog post!

As I mentioned in my Invest More Time in Developing Content for Digital Properties post, I recently attended the content marketing workshop at the Healthcare Marketing Strategy Summit in Scottsdale, AZ this week.

One great insight I heard is the fact that truly great content marketing happens at the intersection of user needs, resources and business strategy.

As Ed Bennett, Scott Linabarger and Shel Holtz explained, to create great content, adhere to the following strategies:

Align with business needs. Some content is simply going to be more valuable to the organization than others, so focus on strategically important specialties and then partner with your service line marketing folks to understand what moves the business. Content is a long-term strategy and not an event, so meet regularly to identify, prioritize, review and plan. At the Cleveland Clinic, Scott Linabarger asks the following questions to determine what content will be most valuable: What will people travel for? What do we do best? What do we offer that is unique? Where are the growth opportunities?
Be user focused. This applies not only to the writing style that you employ but also to the content you choose to develop and the way you deliver it. Start with a general idea of user needs and then refine with analytics. For example, Cleveland Clinic noticed an increase in food-focused searches on its site around 4:00 pm on weekdays. Why? Most likely consumers are getting hungry or planning dinner. An interesting insight, but what can you do with that information? The Clinic started regularly posting recipes in the late afternoon with great success. To ensure that they’re posting recipes that their audience wants, they occasionally ask their Facebook followers what they’d like to see. A typical morning post might be about breakfast choices, information to help in planning your day, or a topic about things that are interfering with a good night’s sleep. Mid-afternoon is often recipes. While a late night post could discuss how doing yoga improves sleep.
Editorial calendar. It’s hard to consistently deliver great content if you’re waiting for a spark of inspiration. Plan in advance what content is needed and commit to a regular schedule.
Stretch your content investments by leveraging a range of formats. Look, for example, at how McKinsey Quarterly unbundles research reports – they offer a summary abstract, the full report, the full report in eBook format, along with podcasts, short video interviews and sometimes even infographics.

For more information on content marketing and content production for your website, check out Geonetric’s white paper on Web writing for healthcare and learn more about the latest in content marketing trends.

Invest More Time Developing Content for Digital Properties

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Ben Dillon

In truth, we should be spending more time on content and less on functionality, organization and design.

This was the underlying message in a content marketing workshop at the Healthcare Marketing Strategy Summit in Scottsdale, AZ this week. The workshop, led by industry heavyweights Ed Bennett from University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC), Scott Linabarger from the Cleveland Clinic and consultant Shel Holtz not only discussed the growing importance of good content, but also focused on steps to develop and promote this information. Here are just some of the highlights:

Every organization is a media company now.

This used to be the case for companies that made their money selling content or allowing the rest of us to accomplish our marketing goals by advertising alongside that content. Today, thanks to Tivo, dual-screen viewing, or the ability to tune out, consumers can easily ignore the flood of messages that make up a normal day.

People couldn’t care less about our hospitals right up to the point when they need us.

So the best strategy is have the content they need available and findable at that moment when an individual consumer needs it. Then become the key health information resource for them. Regardless of their health situation and level of engagement.

We’re seeing convergence.

PR is no longer just earned media. The lines blur. Earned, owned or paid and social are all colliding. When someone sees a video that a friend shared, they don’t care if that video was created as a TV ad created by your agency or by an enterprising individual in your emergency department. They only care if it’s interesting, relevant and engaging.

Content must be discoverable.

UMMC’s Ed Bennett asks a simple question – Why do our Web visitors come here? The answer is often as simple as they were recently diagnosed with some condition, searched the Web for more information and found UMMC content. So the discussion moved on how to make your content findable:

The most obvious, but sometimes overlooked answer is to get your content online. For example, you may put out a print magazine, but it’s never there when you need it. Putting that content online creates an asset with lasting value.
Avoid vapor – have good content and lots of it.
Don’t ignore the long tail – UMMC has 80 doctors and other medical professionals answering an amazing 12,000(!) patient questions every year. They’re creating great content that’s very discoverable. The long tail is important here because these are the terms that allow you to compete with fewer people for consumers who are more likely to come to you.

It’s important to create content that’s very shareable as well.

My.Clevelandclinic.org is a busy site with more than 4 million visits per month. The health encyclopedia format worked well for findability in search engines but made the content less prone to be shared so they’ve added a new Web property called HealthHub for newsy, topical health articles written by or reviewed by Cleveland Clinic experts. HealthHub features 3-5 new posts each day in one of five content categories:

Improve my health today
Validate me and my condition
Give me hope
Cure me now
Tell me something I didn’t know

Shareability and findability are both important.

Don’t just study Google’s Pagerank algorithm. Also learn about Facebook Edgerank, the rating it uses to determine what posts appear in a Facebook user’s new feed. Edgerank takes into account not only how current a piece of content is, but also an individual’s relationship with the brand posting it based on how they’ve interacted with that brand since becoming a follower. Clicking “Like” on a post doesn’t account for as much value as clicking on the link in a post or sharing posts from the brand with their own friends. So getting Facebook followers is important but most people who like a brand on the popular social networking site never go back. Engagement is more important to Edgerank than the sheer number followers that you have.

When looking at content sharing the number of views is less important than the number of shares. If they’re not talking about you, you don’t exist.

That’s not all!

As you can see, it was a great session with a lot of takeaways. In fact, I couldn’t fit them all into this blog post. Check out The Keys to Creating Great Content for more information from this workshop.

Thomas Goetz Tells a Healthy Story

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Ben Dillon

During a general session at the Healthcare Marketing Strategies National Summit this week, Thomas Goetz told a great story about engaging health consumers.

It’s the story of Jean Nidetch, a 1960’s housewife who battles with her weight for many years. There’s new research at the time indicating that the best way to lose weight is to eat fewer calories and become more active. While this is common knowledge today, in the 1960’s this was a revelation.

This new information is so important, in fact, that the New York Department of Health decides to take this new information directly to the public through a series of community meetings and Mrs. Nidetch attends.

While she believes the new information and takes the advice to heart, it simply doesn’t work for her. She’s still unable to maintain these behaviors despite her wish to do so. But Jean decides a different strategy and takes the information that she’s learned to her friends and neighbors. They then begin meeting regularly to give one another advice and support.

This was, as you may have guessed, the founding of Weight Watchers.

What Jean Nidetch discovered was the power of what we now refer to as a feedback loop. Her meetings instituted a few simple steps that are still at the heart of Weight Watchers meetings today:

Education
Support and encouragement
Transparency and accountability (the weigh in)
Repeat every week

It wasn’t enough to have a set of goals. It required a process to support these goals in order to make these changes in her life.

Enter Technology

Building on this story, and what Thomas Goetz explores in his book The Decision Tree, is how to empower health consumers to make healthy changes in their lives through technology.

We can do what Jean Nidetch did, but thanks to technology we can roll it out and scale its adoption in ways that we’ve never been able to do in the past.

Weight Watchers online provides a toolset to support members between meetings. Using the online platform in conjunction with in-person meetings is the most effective way to lose weight and keep it off.

Stickk.com uses negative feedback to encourage adherence to goals. Users set goals on the site along with a donation. If you fail to achieve your goal, the money gets donated to an organization that you hate. While not exclusively for health-related goals, it gets lots of health goal usage.

The Nike Fuel Band is an accelerometer that measures your activity throughout the day and can work in conjunction with the Nike+ running system. The strength of the tool is not just in its form factor – a bracelet that is difficult to forget or lose – it also connects to an online portal which uses goals and community membership to encourage users to pursue their fitness objectives.

Basis watch is another wearable tracking device that measures more than just movement to track the quality of your sleep and other biometric indicators. Plus, it’s a watch, and don’t underestimate the power of that to get users to put it on every morning.

Moving Ahead

From online health portals to accelerometer watches, there is no doubt technology is being used to help us live healthier lives. But, are they working?

According to Goetz, there are four principles technology needs to achieve to really improve our ability to make positive change in our lives:

Speak to the individual
Minimize friction
Allow for failure
Mark progress

Many of the technologies out there do a great job of this – creating a personalized experience, making adoption easy, creating non-threatening environments and focusing on the all-important measurement, measurement, measurement.

Thanks Mr. Goetz for an interesting session and for telling a great story – and for providing an interesting perspective on how we can use technology to manage population health.

Awareness is a Crutch When Measuring Marketing Success

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Ben Dillon

Healthcare marketers track consumers, communicate with them, engage with them, build relationships with them, and then convert them. That’s the true goal of marketing success.

So how is it that so many of us have come to focus on awareness as our key success measurement? Look at our marketing today. Campaigns that say little more than “look at me, look at me!” Billboards and TV ads with no call to action. Web efforts measured by the number of visits.

Does any of that really matter? Does it move the needle of success for your organization? Does your CFO care?

The answer, of course, is “No.”

Awareness is a concept that was created to price mass market advertising tools. Two billboards aren’t created equal – one is better than the other because of the number of people who see it. That’s all awareness measures – how many people see your message.

But seeing isn’t believing. And seeing certainly isn’t becoming a patient.

Instead we should be measuring how many consumers walk through the door as a result of our engagement and relationship building efforts.

But most of us don’t. We focus instead on measuring awareness.

And we wonder why we have trouble getting more budget allocations. Think how much stronger our arguments at the budget table would be if we could demonstrate that our marketing delivered real value.

So instead of buying as many views as possible for the least amount of money, try creating marketing that truly engages and connects with consumers and converts them into patients. Start counting how many prospects your marketing turned into patients.

Easier said than done right? Well if you want to learn how to use digital marketing to generate real results – and we don’t mean awareness – join us for our upcoming webinar Reinventing Digital Marketing Campaigns on Thursday, May 23, 2013 at 3:00 p.m.

Death of the Mobile Web

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Ben Dillon

It’s time to stop talking about mobile.

Sure, smartphone and tablets are increasingly becoming our go-to devices for browsing the Internet. The average Geonetric client has more than 20% visits to their website coming from mobile devices today and will likely clear the 25% level by mid-year.

So, why should we stop talking about it?

Convergence

We’ve had increasingly fuzzy categories in the mobile space for a while now. Phones are getting so large that they barely fit in your hand. A greater range of tablet sizes have made some “tablets” barely larger than some “phones.”

More than that, though, Windows 8 has hit the scene.

Windows 8 is the latest Microsoft operating system. While it’s similar to what you use today, it’s designed to natively support touchscreens. The result is an explosion of new devices on the market. Wander into your local Best Buy and look at the new computers and laptops. You can now buy a 27” touchscreen computer that you can pick up and put on the coffee table to flip through vacation photos – is that a tablet? My wife just purchased a new convertible laptop. It’s a 12” laptop that, with a flip of the screen turns into a large tablet. Or look at the heavily-marketed Microsoft Surface Pro which the folks in Redmond bill as “A laptop in tablet form.”

The numbers aren’t keeping up

Most of us these days are using Google Analytics to get our Web metrics. While GA is adapting to the quickly changing landscape, they’re clearly not keeping up with what’s important when it comes to the mobile landscape.

I mentioned earlier that one-in-five visits to our clients’ websites came from mobile devices. Last year, GA finally rolled out the ability to view traffic from “tablets” separately – an important bit of information. Your strategy might be different if your traffic comes primarily from iPads verse phones. It doesn’t, by the way. We’re typically seeing mobile traffic split about 4:1 phones to tablets. But I digress.

GA isn’t categorizing devices like the Microsoft Surface as tablets or any other form of mobile. Furthermore, it only reports other key information in specific scenarios (touchscreen support only for mobile) or not at all (do they have a mouse?).

So what does it all mean?

Going forward, we’re not going to be able to determine how many mobile-esque devices are really used to access our sites. From here on out, we’re undercounting.

But remember why we cared about this in the first place. The information isn’t merely academic. We wanted to know because our desktop-targeted websites just didn’t work on these new devices. We were building stand-alone microsites as a crutch to provide some limited access to our online presences for smartphones.

But that’s not the way serious websites deal with their mobile audience anymore. We use responsive design which, we all recall, helps insulate us from whatever new devices come in the future. At one-in-five visits (and we have some clients that are closer to half of visits), haven’t we reached that tipping point where there’s really a choice not to go with responsive sites?

So it’s time to stop talking about mobile and, from here on out, just refer to it as the Web.

The desktop-centric Web is dead. Long live the responsive Web.

How Metrics and Transparency Will Make You a Better Digital Marketer

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Ben Dillon

“You can only manage what you can measure.”

– Peter Drucker

It’s easy to get obsessed with numbers and metrics when you’re working with the Web. There’s no shortage of information about what’s happening with your website, app or campaign. The cup of data overfloweth.

For a certain set of people, and I count myself in this category, data is just fascinating. I find myself getting lost in spreadsheets and databases while attempting to tease out just one more insight.

But the point of data isn’t in the data. It’s often not even in the insights that come from the data. The point is the act of measurement itself.

Measurement creates focus. This is really the reason why we do it. This is really why it matters.

If you’re doing your metrics properly the process starts with defining goals. Aiming only matters if you know what your target looks like. So you start with goals and the goals lead to metrics.

If you don’t approach the problem from this direction, it’s easy to get into trouble. I was recently reviewing the pay per click (PPC) campaign work that a client was having done with a third party. Initially they were thrilled with the numbers they were seeing – a large numbers of clicks, with a low cost per click. As we talked about why they were making the investment and what their goals were – questions that they were never asked and hadn’t considered before starting the PPC campaign – it became clear that there were many issues:

Traffic was going to the wrong pages – generic service line pages rather than campaign landing pages
They needed offers associated with the campaign that didn’t exist
The quality of the traffic (complete with near 100 percent bounce rates) was terrible
They were paying for many brand keywords that were not specific to the campaign and which they already owned from an organic search perspective
And, in some cases, they were promoting offerings for which patients rarely choose providers of have much input

Where was the problem in this? They never defined the ultimate goals of the effort! And they confused operational metrics with goal targets. Beginning with a goal of scheduled procedures rather than the general tactical charge of “promote this service line” would naturally have led to questions about converting browsers to patients, targeting audience segments, messaging needs, and a just a more holistic view of the process.

Instead, they’d been feeling good about money that they were throwing away.

Setting up a process for goal-driven marketing is not hard to do. To learn how to do this, and to learn more about how metrics and transparency will make you a better digital marketer, join us on April 18, 2013 at 3:00 p.m. CST for a complimentary webinar Translating Site Data Into Action.

Healthcare Marketing Reform

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Ben Dillon

I’ve spent a lot of time recently pondering the role of marketers in a post-reform healthcare system. Healthcare is undergoing an incredible period of change. While we’re still unclear on the specifics of how things will play out, the failures of the current system that we hope to correct are well established:

Costs are growing out of control.
No accountability for the costs of delivering care.
No accountability for quality or outcomes.
The results that we get from the current investment is mediocre.
A lack of consistent, evidence-based, data-driven decision making.
Lots of waste resulting from a lack of coordination.

As marketers look to understand how we’ll adapt to reform, there’s no shortage of ideas. Some suggest that marketing will go away. Others predict that the goals of marketing will simply change. Instead of driving usage of expensive services such as cardiology and oncology, marketers would focus on driving volume to preventive and early detection services that would reduce or eliminate the overall costs of treatment. Still others suggest that, despite the changes, marketers will do pretty much of what they do today, only targeting that slice of the patient population with high-paying private insurance.

What I don’t hear is any discussion about changing how marketing gets done.

The healthcare industry is being asked (or told) to change the way that it does everything. The models of care delivery are changing, as are the payment and delivery structures.

It’s very presumptive to think that marketing will continue to work as it always has, with only a few small tweaks to what it is we’re marketing or who we’re marketing it to.

Look back at the list of issues faced by the healthcare industry. That list could just as easily have been applied to healthcare marketing:

We cost too much.
Our results are often intangible and take too long to deliver value.
We have no accountability to prove what tactics are working . . . and, in the absence of that data, we continue to put our resources behind strategies and channels that don’t produce results.
We aren’t coordinating our efforts in a way that have the maximum impact on the health consumers that we need to reach.

Certainly, this requires bold adoption of new marketing tools, both tools for reaching consumers and tools for measuring the results of our efforts.

More importantly, it’s going to require marketers to be better, faster and stronger. We’ll need to deliver more value, more quickly, for a lower investment.

It’s a bold challenge that lies ahead. Our organizations are setting up new foundations to enable the changes that they’ll go through in the coming years. Is your marketing department ready?

Healthcare Content Marketing: Which Dinner Guest Are You?

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Ben Dillon

Content marketing can be a tough concept to wrap your head around. The idea that we should market by not bragging about ourselves seems counter-intuitive to many marketers.

But really it makes a lot of sense. It helps to think it through with a real-life example. So let me tell you a story. It’s called “A Tale of Two Dinner Guests.”

Think back to dinner parties you’ve attended in the past. You probably remember that one person who talks a little too much about himself. The subject of conversation doesn’t matter— he always finds a way to spin it to be about him. He name drops here and there, and certainly shares lots of chatter intended to say, “Look at how awesome I am!”

Elsewhere in the room was probably a party guest who is always surrounded by a flock of people. She is smart and speaks with authority on a variety of topics. But more importantly, she’s a good listener and spends more time asking the right questions than talking about herself. Other guests find her interesting and respect her perspective. And chances are those same guests are quick to reach out to her when they need help in her area of expertise.

Now, think about your marketing. Which dinner guest are you? Do you constantly interrupt the conversation screaming, “Look at me!”? Or are you a good listener, letting others direct the conversation and providing useful and interesting insights?

Content marketing is about being that second guest. Spending less time telling people how awesome you are and instead, demonstrating it by providing interesting and insightful information about the topics your audience cares about.

In some ways, this isn’t such a radical concept for healthcare organizations. You probably send out a monthly magazine through one of the custom publishing houses. That’s content marketing!

But content marketing has become far more sophisticated since it went digital. Pinpoint targeting and real-time tracking are now the norm.

To learn more about how organizations have embraced content marketing and how your organization can do the same, join us for our complementary webinar on March 28 at 3:00 p.m. CST – Content Marketing for Healthcare.

The Case for Content

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Ben Dillon

When we began helping hospitals develop websites more than a dozen years ago, content was just something that had to get done. It was written at the last minute. Copy and pasted as-is from brochures. Developed by a summer intern without a lot of thought.

Fortunately, this is changing. Healthcare organizations are realizing content is one of the most important assets on a website. Here are a few reasons why:

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine rankings and search traffic are probably a top goal for you. You want to be found, and Google is the gatekeeper. Google lets us know what drives its hundreds of algorithm changes. At the top of its list is content quality. Google wants original content that’s well written and presented in a readable fashion without many ads. Google also likes content other people like. It tracks links and other “social cues” such as how many people share it on Twitter. Bottom line: Poor content doesn’t get shared.

Permission-Based

Content needs to be more than well written and factually accurate. It also needs to be interesting. In our permission-based world, you need to earn your way onto consumers’ radars. Your content should provide information people want in a way that encourages them to share it through social media. Or better yet, your content should be so interesting and reliable that consumers want to follow it directly.

Site Visitor Needs

When someone arrives at your site, they want information from you. They’re looking for education about disease, assistance with making decisions and information that sells them on your organization and services. Good content helps them make those decisions, while bad content just might encourage them to go elsewhere – like to your competitor’s site.

Well-constructed content reinforces the visitor’s decision to come to the site, grabs their attention and leads them to engage with the site further or to take an action. Remember that the goal isn’t to get visitors TO your site but to get them to USE your services and become a patient!

Duration

So much of what we do in marketing is gone in an instant if you don’t keep feeding it. That PPC campaign may be great, but if you stop putting money behind it, the benefit goes away. Social media can be effective, but that post from today drops off the radar in the blink of an eye.

Website content on the other hand is an investment with a long shelf-life. Creating a great piece of content delivers SEO benefits and value to visitors for years to come.

Foundation

It’s easy to get wrapped up in interactive site capabilities, calls to action, videos and campaigns. There’s a lot of fun stuff we do online. Whereas writing thousands of pages of content is not exciting. It’s hard work. But that doesn’t mean it should be ignored!

The content on your website is a foundation – the bedrock on which great experiences happen. Organizations that launch creative campaigns without a solid foundation of content to back it up often don’t see the value they expected. There’s no substitute for having solid content on your site. Once you have that in place you can do great things!

I hope this gives you some insight into why great content matters. To learn about how to get great content and use it effectively, join us for a free webinar event – The Content Conundrum on Feb 21 at 3:00 p.m. CT.

Are You Tracking Your Health?

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Ben Dillon

According to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly seven in 10 Americans track a health indicator, such as weight or blood pressure.

As we look to the health system of the future, more self-management will be required, and capturing this information and sharing it with a caregiver will be critical for patient-centered medical home models. So seeing people track their health is a good sign. But 7 in 10? That seems out of step with my personal experience.

Let’s look at what Pew means here. From the Tracking for Health report, they found that people who track a health indicator track their weight, diet or exercise routine (60%), track other indicators like blood pressure, sleep or headaches (33%), or tracking health indicators for a friend or loved one (12%).

Furthermore, half of “trackers” chart progress “in their heads.” Only 34% put that information to paper and a spare 21% use technology (I know that doesn’t add to 100% – respondents could pick multiple answers).

So that 7 in 10 includes everything from diabetics with glucometers to weight watchers to anyone at the gym who knows how much weight they lost last week. It’s broad, but at some level more of us are paying attention than we might realize.

And I shouldn’t be so cynical. Respondents with more chronic conditions were much more likely to be tracking (no chronic conditions: 19%, 1 condition: 40%, 2+ conditions 62%), so we can assume that some of that tracking was for those chronic conditions. In addition, more than half of trackers say that tracking has affected their health or how they treat an illness or condition.

Techno-trackers

Let’s focus in on the 21% of technologically-engaged health trackers:

8% use a medical device, like a glucose meter
7% use an app or other tool on their mobile phone or device
5% use a spreadsheet
1% use a website or other online tool

Younger trackers are more likely to use an app (16% of 18-29 year-olds) but older users are more likely to track overall (41% of 65+). Older health trackers are also more likely to use a medical device in their tracking (14% of 50-64 group, 12% of 65+ group), but this is probably due to the chronic conditions that are more prevalent in these populations as much as age-related factors.

This tells me a few things. First, convenience matters. The ability to take the tracking tool with you seems to correlate with greater adoption rates as does having a device that does the tracking for you. Second, health consumers use the tools that their doctors give (or prescribe) to them.

Third, and perhaps more astounding, is that the growth of apps in this space must be very dramatic. We know that SmartPhone adoption has grown at a tremendous pace in the past several years. Couple that with the fact that use of mobile tools for tracking has nearly reached the level of tracking of medical devices (which we’ve had for a long time), and it appears that mobile tracking will be the most significant shifting point in this space.

Convergence of mobile and devices?

We’ve seen substantial growth in the number of connected health tracking devices in recent years. These range from internet-connected bathroom scales, to blood glucose meters that sync through apps on your mobile device, to internet-connected forks that help you manage overeating. In fact, this year’s Consumer Electronics Show dedicated two tracks to digital health.

Devices based in the home, like the bath scale, typically utilize Wi-Fi to sync up data. For devices on the go, however, the growing pool of SmartPhones provide a more reliable tool set to sync data, visualize the data and support self-management.

This allows devices to be smaller and more elegant. Consumers love this. For example, the Misfit Shine, a quarter-sized activity tracker recently raised eight times its goal in a crowd sourced funding campaign.

Coupling better devices and better tools will bring progress, but if these tools are then prescribed by doctors and made part of the care experience for patients, this could be an industry game changer.

One parting bit of data for the analytics geeks out there. Several Pew reports have been released recently. In addition to the Tracking For Health report, there’s also a new version of Pew’s internet healthcare tracking report, Health Online 2013 and, in November, a report on Mobile Health was released.

Let’s pull together a few stats across those reports:

Building an Extraordinary Mobile App

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Ben Dillon

I’ve weighed in before on when to use a mobile app rather than a mobile website. But once you choose the app route, how do you create something that consumers will actually use?

This was the question posed to a panel of application developers at the mHealth Summit. Their thoughts provide a great framework for anyone approaching the app market.

Start Out by Solving a Problem

Many apps fail right off the bat because they are based on a clever idea that just doesn’t appeal to the consumer. Don’t build first and then try to find a market for the app! A better approach is to find a distinct pain point for a group of people and then solve that problem with the app.

One way to find a need for a consumer-focused app is to mirror the patient’s journey with their health challenges. Condition-centric apps tend to deliver more value after diagnosis, educating consumers about their condition, connecting them with a support community, encouraging lifestyle change and helping with the long-term management of their disease.

Direct to Consumer is Really Tough

Consumers are fickle. They don’t download many apps. They don’t try many that they do download. Most of those are only used once or twice and then they’re abandoned or deleted.

As a developer, the panel encouraged building apps with the intent of selling to companies or provider organizations that will then take it to consumers rather than marketing to consumers directly.

Providers, on the other hand, have the opportunity to integrate apps into the work they already do with patients and physicians can prescribe it to patients.

Design the Experience Carefully

The panel encouraged the audience to focus their apps on the things they truly need to do and do those things well. In other words, be very focused when it comes to selecting features.

Design, too, is a major consideration. Be conscious of the way that you use space, time and effort. Follow a philosophy of “more signal, less noise.” Many apps use up their most valuable screen real estate with elaborate filter criteria rather than valuable content and information.

The most important information should also be the most obvious. Don’t give everything the same weight. To accomplish this, build the experience around the information that you’re presenting, not around navigation. The most important detail should be brought to the front and the context should be obvious from its presentation.

An EMR example was used to illustrate this idea. In a typical EMR, patient identifying information might be in small print in the application title bar, meaningful information is buried under levels of navigation, and organized by episodes of care.

Apps are a Commitment

This type of development can be expensive. Many of theapps discussed by the panel cost upwards of $100k to build. Why the big price tag? Well, the app market is complicated with lots of operating systems and devices to consider. Add in the ongoing commitment of supporting new devices and a stream of OS updates and it end ups being a significant investment.

The Future of Apps

Apps clearly have a role to play in the mobile landscape, but it’s important to understand where they fit. To learn more about the future of mobile, download our free white paper.

Intranet in Your Pocket?

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Ben Dillon

I‘m at the mHealth Summit outside of Washington D.C. learning about the emerging role that mobile technology is playing in healthcare delivery. The numbers are the ones we’ve heard over and over again – growing smartphone and tablet adoption, faster data plans and pervasive Wi-Fi.

Most of my focus relates to the ways in which consumers use mobile technology and the opportunities mobile provides for healthcare organizations to connect with consumers.

In contrast, much of the mHealth Summit discussion revolves around how clinicians and staff use mobile devices. A recent study from Manhattan Research indicates that large numbers of clinical professionals are using smartphones during patient consultations.

This BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) world presents an opportunity to change the way we communicate within our organizations, and yet very few healthcare organizations have a mobile-optimized intranet.

One of the challenges that regularly pops up in intranet discussions is one of access. Many of our hospital employees don’t sit in front of a computer most of the day. However, they do have smartphones in their pocket which would be an ideal way to deliver intranet communications.

There are a few steps to make this work. For starters, intranets need to be made accessible via mobile devices, the authentication process needs to be streamlined, and most importantly, intranets need to apply responsive design concepts to ensure they work smoothly on all devices.

These are little more than speed bumps on the road to new opportunities.

Join us on December 13th at 3:00 p.m. CT to look more deeply at how to enhance communications with your employees and staff through your intranet.

What Disney Can Teach Your Doctor’s Office

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Ben Dillon

Our family did something a little different this Thanksgiving. Rather than the traditional turkey, parades and football – we headed down to Disney World with my parents, my brothers and their families.

If there’s one thing that Disney does well, it’s creating an immersive experience that allows the child in all of us to suspend our disbelief and accept talking mice and dancing teapots. Disney’s built a leadership institute that teaches other organizations to apply the operating philosophy they’ve developed for maintaining that experience and delighting visitors at every turn.

When I’ve talked with graduates of the Disney programs they routinely focus on the concepts of on-stage vs. off-stage spaces. A child’s Disney experiences would quickly be ruined by seeing Goofy holding his puppet head under one arm or Cinderella having a smoke backstage, after all. To prevent this, Disney pioneered a physical plant design approach that keeps all of the details of how the sausage is made out of the sight of visitors.

What I found most interesting during my time in the house of the mouse was a growing focus on waiting around as a part of the experience. Waiting for rides and attractions is a fact of life in any amusement park, and the Thanksgiving crowds put a lot of pressure on the queues.

While waiting may be inevitable, it’s clearly a risk to the experience that Disney wants to mitigate. So they’ve found some very creative ways to address this:

For starters, Disney gets good data to work from. Periodically, someone is given a red card when they get into line that they turn in before boarding. This gives reliable timely data on the current wait. While I anticipate that someone somewhere analyzed that information, the more practical implication is that they post wait time information at the ride entrance and on smartphone apps.
Disney also understands the psychology of the waiter and has given a lot of thought to how they set expectations. I believe that they pad the wait times that they report to avoid that all-to-frequent restaurant negative point of waiting longer than you were told.
Another clever solution to the wait question is Disney’s Fastpass system. They realized many years ago that only certain attractions get the really long wait times while others were underutilized. Why not let visitors use the less busy rides and attractions while they wait for the most popular? While the details of Fastpass are complicated, this is essentially what the system accomplishes.
With the Fastpass system in place, Disney has been able to use it in creative ways. For example, adults staying behind with children can get a special similar pass to board rides after the rest of their party returns. Disney also uses the high perceived value of the passes to their advantage, handing out the passes to those just entering the park to fill under-attended shows or offering them as compensation for bad experiences like getting stuck on a ride.
Most impressive to me was the ways that Disney integrated waiting into the experience for an attraction. Sure, you might wait 35 minutes for the Muppet show, but that seems less onerous when there’s a 15 minute Muppet-filled warm up act in the waiting area before you go in. And the interactive games built into the waiting lines for some attractions were as much fun as the attractions themselves (the Haunted Mansion is a great example here – I highly recommend the graveyard).

For all of that, there were also times where the system simply failed. The busses from our Disney resort to the parks were the most painful example. Sometimes the busses were efficient and convenient. While other times waits for a bus were excessive – only to have several busses for the same park arrive at once or several busses in a row would stop only to be too full to accommodate any additional passengers.

Unfortunately, this looks a lot like the waiting system that we find at many doctors’ offices and hospitals today!

Waiting is part of the healthcare experience, too. While it may not be inevitable, we could take some pointers from Disney and think about that wait differently:

Get good wait time data from our EMR systems. Post that in the waiting rooms, and make it available on our websites and mobile apps to help patients make better decisions. Also, make sure someone somewhere is analyzing that data.
Let patients do their wait somewhere other than your waiting room with remote online appointment check-in or call ahead urgent care. Either set a time for them to come into the office or send them a text message 10 minutes before it’s time for them to come in.
Integrate waiting into the experience. If the patient is waiting for a test or is being seen for a particular condition, provide them with resources about that test or condition before they see the doctor. It makes both their waiting time and the limited face time that they get with their physician more productive.

But most of all get creative with the solutions! Like it or not, waiting around is part of the experience and it can take a great experience with a provider and ruin it in the eyes of the patient. Take a new outlook on this patient pain point and your organization can turn these experience killers around too.

Author Archives: Ben Dillon

About Ben Dillon

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Shareability and findability are both important.

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Intranet in Your Pocket?

What Disney Can Teach Your Doctor’s Office