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.

A Hard Lesson Learned in Social Media Account Management from hmv

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Nicole Knoll

After announcing 190 job losses yesterday, British entertainment retail company hmv learned important lessons regarding social media and crisis communication. One employee with access to the @hmvtweets Twitter account tweeted play-by-plays of the layoffs not just from her personal account of @poppy_powers, but from the hmv corporate account itself.

Her first tweet set the stage, “We’re tweeting live from HR where we’re all being fired! Exciting!! #hmvXFactorFiring.” Later she highlighted how easy it was for her to execute the tweets and more disturbingly, why the tweets stayed up on the account for hours allowing the story to spread like wildfire, “Just overheard our Marketing Director (he’s staying, folks) ask “How do I shut down Twitter?” #hmvXFactorFiring.”

Shut down Twitter? Nothing says “unprepared” like that sentence. When a social media crisis appears you should leverage Twitter to mitigate the damage. Acknowledge the situation to your followers and clearly communicate what will happen next. Don’t place blame or act like nothing happened.

This story isn’t just about having more than one social media community manager in place for your accounts as back-up, it’s about appreciating the influence of social media. Social media isn’t just a component of the marketing mix every company should have in place ‘because our competitor is doing it.’ Social media is a valuable tool that can be used to generate real relationships with current and potential customers. And when everyone in your organization understands that, a strong social media identity can take shape that represents the true essence of your company.

Poppy said it perfectly on her own account when explaining her actions, “I hoped that today’s actions would finally show them the true power and importance of Social Media, and I hope they’re listening.”

I too hope many companies listen and learn from this, Poppy.

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.

Snow Globes and Security Checkpoints

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Michelle LeCompte

I was standing in a lengthy security line at LaGuardia Airport last month, when I came upon this sign.

My first response was, “Seriously?” My second response was, “And now you tell us?” Because a traveler needs to know about the sanction on snow globes before they get to the security checkpoint. In fact, wouldn’t the right time to share this rule come before you fork over cash for the snow globe at the airport gift shop?

Given this restriction, I’m not even sure why they sell snow globes at LaGuardia. My theory is that there are only six snow globes in the entire airport, which are sold at the gift shops, confiscated at security and resold again. But I digress.

My point is actually about the Web. It’s about the responsibility we have to our audience to give them what they need where and when they need it.

Take individuals experiencing chest pain. If they’re deciding where to go for help, they’re most likely looking at ER information – not searching through your cardiovascular content.

So meet them where they are. Include signs of a heart attack – and signs of a stroke – in your ER section. Anticipate what else they’ll need:

Wait times
Maps and directions
What to bring – lists of medication (or the medication itself), information about allergies, recent test results, an insurance card

And of course, if they have symptoms of heart attack, emphasize the need to call 911 immediately. Lifesaving care doesn’t begin at the hospital. It starts the moment the call is made – with instructions from the dispatcher and when EMS arrives on the scene.

Follow this thinking throughout your website. Identify some of the most common reasons people come to your site – such as scheduling a mammogram, paying a bill or signing up for a class – and give them what they need to complete that task.

Step into your users’ shoes. What do they need to know? What information should they have before they start? How can you avoid snow globe scenarios?

Make it as easy as possible for them to take action – and avoid surprises – and you’re well on your way to positive user experiences and patient satisfaction.

We’re a Bit Obsessed with Feedback: Client Satisfaction Q2 2012

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Eric Engelmann

We’ve been having a great year at Geonetric and we’re making huge strides in a number of areas. One thing we hold constant is our focus on client satisfaction. In fact, though we’ve consistently surveyed clients every quarter for about five years, we recently updated our mission statement to include “To ‘Wow!’ our clients.” So as you can imagine, we don’t just strive for average. Mediocre survey results simply won’t do.

We share the compiled results every quarter with our entire team. We pat each other on the back for successes and talk candidly about opportunities for improvement. We also share the results with our clients – especially in instances where we changed a process or enhanced a feature due to their direct feedback.

We don’t always post the scores publicly. But every once in a while something interesting comes out of the survey that makes me think… this is blog worthy. This is one of those times.

Overall Score

The primary measure we watch is the overall satisfaction score. This quarter’s overall average client satisfaction improved slightly over last quarter, with score of 5.06, up from 5.00 in Q1. This is on a scale of 1.0-6.0, and our goal is to be at 5.0 or better – intentionally a difficult measure to achieve. For example, we need to be getting a bunch of 6.0s – perfect scores – to keep ahead of our 5.0 mark in the event any individual client ranks us less than 5.0.

In short, the Geonetric team has been working exceptionally hard this year to ‘Wow!’ clients, and the scores reflect that, overall, we’re doing very well by our clients.

Areas Where We Excelled

In addition to the overall scores, we ask clients for their ratings in 11 other categories. The highest areas of satisfaction were with the relationships they have with individuals – the Project Managers (5.22) and Account Managers (5.15). It’s not surprising that we scored highest here, since we focus tremendous energy on the depth of the relationships we have with clients. Some of the ways we do that include:

Weekly or biweekly status calls with almost every single client to keep projects flowing smoothly.
Clients generally keep the same Project Manager and Account Manager before and after launch – in many cases for years at a time. Clients don’t get passed off to a help desk. Ever.
Quarterly calls to evaluate performance, track ROI, and benchmark against peer groups.

For our clients who have come over from competitors, where they often haven’t talked to anyone except the help desk for months or years, the depth of these relationships is a shocking change!

Here are some actual comments from our amazing clients:

“My experience with account and project management is always superb.”
“You have excellent, hard-working employees, an ace of a system in VitalSite, excellent account and project management, amazing follow up and support and you are all so nice!”
“My team is extremely pleased with how things went [with the new site launch]. I am pleased with the overall relationship, the attention to detail, and the on-time delivery of a great new site.”
“I think, overall, very highly of Geonetric’s people, processes and technology and recommend them to others.”

Continue reading →

Why Healthcare Marketers Should Consider Nurturing a Relationship Via Social Media with Teens

Posted on June 20, 2012 by GeoVoices

Like most of you, I have a fat folder filled with articles to read ‘when I get time.’ It’s stocked with interesting tidbits of life and culture, trends and hot topics that I believe all play into the success of social media efforts. With a quick minute free in an otherwise busy day, I was able to turn my attention to a one New York Times article that had kept peeking out at me from the pile, almost taunting me to read it and think about its implications. It ran in the Fashion & Style section back in January and is all about how teens are using blogs as therapy.

Specifically, the article delves into the value and evolution of the traditional diary and journaling versus blogging. Research has long supported the therapeutic benefits of diary-keeping for both boys and girls, according to the article. But what surprised me is that, according to a study published in the Journal of Psychological Services by Meyran Boniel-Nissim and Azy Barak, the therapeutic value of blogging is even greater.

Why? Oddly enough, it was the social value of ‘sharing’ your so-called diary… or what today we would just call a blog. Turns out that the inherent nature of a blog and the engagement tied in with an online community is more effective than a good old fashioned diary at helping teens overcome social fears, anxieties, and other issues.

It got me thinking about who we usually default to when it comes to our social media efforts, our posts and our content. We tend to gravitate towards a certain demographic. But what about these teens? We know they are engaged and willing, but now there’s proof that using social media can actually serve as a resource for positive growth and living. This is an opportunity that doesn’t get discussed often. But I maintain that it’s time to start considering this group in what we do, not only for how we can help and connect with them now, but for the purposes of the future. If we start to nurture a relationship via social media with teens now, it will work towards ensuring that we are the ones they turn to when the time comes to have a baby, find a new doctor or get an elective procedure done.

So in your next spare moment of time, start thinking about what types of resources or support you can offer this demographic now that will build brand loyalty.

I know Geonetric will be keeping a close eye on this demographic and the opportunities to connect with them via social and search marketing efforts.

Improved Health Literacy Won’t Fix Healthcare

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Ben Dillon

In many of the discussions about creating empowered, engaged patients, I hear a common theme: that improving the general health literacy of Americans will largely solve the problem. It’s a view that, in hindsight, I’ve generally agreed with. If only health consumers understood the problems, challenges and tradeoffs of healthcare more fully we would stop bad behavior and when injury or illness occurred, we would make better decisions.

I have come to the conclusion that I’ve been wrong.

This idea has been percolating for a few weeks in the back of my mind after listening to a podcast debating a similar question for financial products. The always thought provoking Freakonomics podcast, an extension of the successful books of the same name, looked at the question of financial literacy as a way to prevent the next financial crisis.

We know the recent financial crisis had many causes, but at the bottom of the food chain were a lot of individual consumers who took out loans they couldn’t afford. Some of those loans couldn’t be afforded because the monthly payments were simply outside what’s reasonable for that individual’s income while others were very complex instruments in which payments ramped up dramatically over the course of the loan and, in some instances, included expensive penalties which made refinancing all but impossible.

So the argument which follows states that a consumer with greater financial literacy would have understood the intricacies of these instruments and never would have agreed to the preposterous terms of the loan. This argument appeals to my laissez-faire streak. After all, I was presented with adjustable rate mortgage options when I refinanced in that same timeframe, realized immediately that the loans were ridiculous, and rejected them outright. If we gave the consumer my level of financial literacy, then we’d have no crisis – right?

But the counter-argument recognizes the impracticability of this answer. I have an MBA with a lot of finance courses under my belt. If that’s what it takes for consumers to make bad decisions then the process is fundamentally broken.

The counter-argument states that financial products are complex. The contracts explaining them are complex. Building a base of knowledge in the general population that would allow them to work through all of that and understand the implications is far too expensive given that this is the sort of transaction that they’ll deal with only a few times in their lives.

Implications for healthcare.

Now look at healthcare. The same assumptions underlying the financial products problem certainly hold true. Healthcare is complex. Building an understanding that would allow for general good decision making in those relatively few occasions in an average consumer’s lifetime is difficult if not impossible. Certainly, it’s a very expensive undertaking and probably prohibitively so.

In the field of usability design, for both online usability and usability of real-world products, there is a general rule that you should design so consumers aren’t able to make bad decisions. In the Web world, for example, you shouldn’t allow a search form to allow for combinations of options that return no results.

Continue reading →

What 10 of the Most “Effective US Health System Websites” Have in Common

Posted on March 12, 2012 by David Sturtz

It’s always good to know where you stand, and very few things help us with this as much as a third party, independent comparative analysis of how our work ranks against the rest of the industry. A peer-reviewed research article published in the February 2012 issue of the Journal of Healthcare Management[1] attempts to do this very thing…

The researchers reviewed 636 hospital and health system websites and ranked each on Accessibility, Content, Marketing, and Technology metrics. An overall score was then computed for each site.

The results are simply outstanding.

Four Geonetric clients are listed in the overall top 25. An additional six sites are leaders in the evaluation categories. What an accomplishment for our clients!

Abington Health
Avera (Listed as both Avera Health and Avera McKennan Hospital and University Health Center)
Children’s Hospital Colorado
Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula
Genesis Health System
Mercy Medical Center
National Jewish Health
Southern Regional Medical Center
St. Vincent’s HealthCare

These ten sites represent community hospitals, specialty hospitals, and health systems from coast to coast — there is obviously more than luck at play in the fact that these sites scored so well.

The winning combination: VitalSite and Geonetric

The fact is, we design our VitalSite content management solution to be the most capable platform in the industry. That means we work hard on fundamental capabilities, like responsive design, navigation that’s possible without Flash or JavaScript, SEO best practices, accessibility and Web standards, to ensure our platform provides our clients with the ultimate technical solution for their content, marketing and portal needs.

On top of that, our design and content teams excel at implementing extraordinary design: information architectures, user experiences and content that informs and motivates action. Couple this with gung-ho clients, and it’s no wonder we’re seeing more and more recognition in the industry. Geonetric has the right tools and the right teams to make an otherwise sleepy website sizzle.

Of course, we’ve been saying this all along. But it’s still nice to have an independent research team acknowledge this to an audience of 30,000 health care professionals in one of the most respected journals in the industry.

Curious about how Geonetric’s software and services can help you? Contact us.

—

[1] Ford, E. W., Huerta, T. R., Schilhavy, R. A. M., Menachemi, N., & Walls, V. U. (January 01, 2012). Effective US Health System Websites: Establishing Benchmarks and Standards for Effective Consumer Engagement. Journal of Healthcare Management, 57, 1, 47-65.

What Pinterest Means for Healthcare Marketers

Posted on March 7, 2012 by GeoVoices

By now you’ve probably heard about Pinterest, the latest craze that has everyone in the social media world doing one of several things:

Oohing and aahing over all the cool and inspiring image boards.
Talking with an air of disbelief about how much time they’ve spent oohing and aahing over all the cool and inspiring image collages.
Gawking at its popularity.

Here at Geonetric, we’ve mostly been gawking at its popularity.

Consider these nuggets about Pinterest (a two year-old social bookmarking site that lets users collect and “pin” things they like on a virtual pinboard):

It’s driving more traffic than YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+ … combined.
It’s one of the biggest website traffic referrers for retailers (check out this infographic by Monetate).
It recorded a fourfold increase in traffic between September 2011 and December 2011 and brought in 7.51 million unique visitors in December 2011 alone, according to Compete.
It has grown from 10 million to 17 million in total visits since the start of the new year, according to Hitwise.

Want does this mean to you, the busy healthcare marketer? You have yet another social media channel to consider when promoting your brand.

So let’s look at the answers to your most pressing Pinterest questions:

Is Pinterest built for healthcare?

Or even business for that matter? No, not specifically. But there are creative ways to take advantage of the channel if used thoughtfully and with purpose. After giving it lots of thought and playing around with it ourselves, we recommend using it to build brand awareness for specific services, your foundation, patient success stories, special events or deliberate campaigns that support those targets.

There has been some chatter in regard to data sharing and privacy, so do your homework.

Who is “putting a pin” in it?

Primarily women. Pinterest content is dominated by images featuring home decor, crafts, fashion and food, and it skews heavily female (58 percent according to Experian) between the ages of 25-44. This is important to know when determining whether this is an appropriate social media channel for your organization.

Continue reading →

With One Hand Behind Their Back

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Ben Dillon

Healthcare is awash with difficult decisions. Patients need to choose between treatment options that having no guarantee of working. Care providers are on the other end of that decision process, evaluating what options are worth sharing with patients and their families and which are not. Payers have an entirely different role in the process, attempting to encourage appropriate use of healthcare resources by choosing to pay for certain procedures and not for others.

There’s no question that it’s a messy process. Differing groups with differing priorities all weighing in on the same choices is a recipe for conflict. The conflicts bubble to the surface when someone says no on an issue when someone else wants the answer to be yes.

This issue has come up more and more often and we’re going to have more issues in the future. Drug shortages in recent years have forced some facilities to choose one patient to receive a particular medication while another does not. In other scenarios we see healthcare providers stockpiling medications, protecting their patients in the process but exacerbating shortages elsewhere. Likewise, as attempts to rein in healthcare costs continue, more patients in dire circumstances will get treatment pre-approval requests rejected.

This happens every day, and families are most often the ones left feeling disappointment and anger. Typically, though, these discussions, decisions, and the aftermath play out behind closed doors.

What happens when they don’t?

What happens when a disappointed family turns to social media and through a clever bit of jujitsu uses your own success in social media to turn your fan base against you? How do you respond?

Continue reading →

More Insights on Meaningful Use Stage 2

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Ben Dillon

As the conference room, and then the overflow room both surged beyond their capacities with HIMSS attendees looking for insights on Stage 2 of Meaningful Use, I began wondering if there would be anything for the presenters to say. Rumors of a new Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) have been swirling for weeks with the date gradually slipping back. Checking Twitter again confirmed that nothing had yet been released this morning.

But we soon learned the NPRM was submitted this morning and will be released to the world later this week. Most importantly, our presenters were allowed to start sharing the important details.

Today’s Meaningful Use Stage 2 discussion was a joint presentation with Farzad Mostashari and Steven Posnack from ONC joined by Elizabeth Holland and Travis Broome from CMS.

The presenters all reiterated that the committees involved have all stayed the course with the intent of the legislation, Stage 1 rules and discussions to date. And, as advertised, most of the information shared was to be expected. Still, with so many different stakeholders involved, it was good to get some confirmation about the direction they’re proposing.

The major themes (and in the time available, we weren’t able to get much more than themes) are as follows:

Streamlined Process
The regulations should be clearer and more flexible. Much of the feedback that the committees took to heart seems to have been in areas where the process didn’t fit the situation. Organizations can now implement only what they need to achieve compliance rather than installing software simply to check a box. Likewise, vendors working on modular certification won’t be required to test against criteria that do not apply to their tools.

Continue reading →

How Do Patients Make Decisions?

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Ben Dillon

We do lots of things in marketing, both online and offline, to build awareness and establish our brand in the eyes of prospective patients. But is this enough to accomplish our goals? More specifically, are we doing the right things to guide patients through their selection process?

How often do we actually look at a patient’s decision-making process? We have generic models, of course, but the actual process varies by service and differing types of cases.

A fascinating case study was just published by Ragan’s Healthcare Communications News. In the article, A millennial’s trip to the ER reveals the key to hospital branding, Jessica Levco recounts a recent ER decision in the competitive Chicago market and concludes that “It’s your staff. It’s your nurses and doctors. It’s how you talk to patients” that makes the difference.

While I absolutely agree that your brand is in the people who live it every day rather than the words on a billboard, I don’t think that’s the most interesting thing in the article.

Jessica walks us through her decision making process:

Which hospital do my friends recommend?
Which hospital accepts my insurance?
How long is the wait?
What cab fare is cheapest?

This follows the classic concepts in behavioral economics about the consumer buying process. Jessica is evaluating access and convenience, minimum acceptable quality and her ability to pay.

Her evaluation tells me a number of things. First, your brand matters, but so does reputation monitoring. She apparently has no pre-conceptions about the facilities nearby, but eliminates the closest ER option on advice of a friend. In her case, she called that friend but admits reviews on Yelp were a factor. Here are two people who likely have little in the way of personal experience with the emergency departments at hospitals throughout the city, so their information is coming from third parties (many of whom are anonymous.)

Second, access and convenience are clearly on her list of priorities. Distance, time and the cost of travel are all factors for consideration, but they don’t end up becoming the decision maker.

In the end, it came down to the ability to pay – who takes her insurance, and she approaches the problem in a strange way. Rather than calling her insurance company or pulling up their website, she calls the ERs directly. It never becomes a question of one of the hospitals not taking her insurance. Rather, one is unable to answer her question at all, passing her around to voicemails and ultimately creating a frustrating experience. She interprets this as one group of employees being nicer than the other.

I think this is a little misplaced.

One group here was empowered to answer her question because they had the right information at their fingertips. Someone anticipated the question. The resources were available.

How often does your organization fail to convert patient opportunities because no one has thought the through the process? Have you promoted something only to find out that the call center dropped the ball when people called in, or someone within the department just didn’t feel like following up on consumer inquiries? How many one-time patients ultimately never return because of unhelpful staff or poor signage?

Very few healthcare organizations have a formal consumer facing sales function and so the role falls to marketing. Unfortunately, many marketing departments are hamstrung by their role as a support function and inability to push operational changes into their organizations.

Others suffer from a lack of information and resources needed to approach problems strategically.

Here are a few thoughts on things you can do to improve prospective patient conversion and retention by looking at the consumer decision-making process:

Key service lines should have a functional understanding of why people need their services and how they evaluate options. Look for off the shelf research that may offer those insights. In the absence of this, a few facilitated focus groups can garner some excellent insights with relatively little investment.
Any effort to attract patients should walk the process from end to end with assigned responsibilities and, ideally, some trackable metrics. Sitting down with the people in the process who you think will be catching what you’re throwing their way will often identify failure points in the process before you ever begin.
Consider using mystery shoppers. I’ve seen the insights good healthcare mystery shoppers can provide. There are so many ways healthcare organizations fail consumers today that we’re unable to see. This can give you the ammunition to get engaged in changing the overall consumer experience in your facility.
Focus on the things you control. This is one of the big reasons why I encourage healthcare organizations to use the Web as a call-to-action in ads and promote its role as a point of engagement. You may not be able to change the attitude of front desk staff or make the call center ask the questions you’d like, but marketing departments typically have control of the consumer’s online experience. Use that to your advantage.

Have iPad, Will Travel

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Ben Dillon

The holidays have come and gone and I took a few weeks away with the family traveling overseas. Being the perennial geek that I am, this gave me a great opportunity to really experiment with some of the more interesting new travel-related technologies and websites out there to help us manage and organize our journey.

I have an unhealthy connection to my laptop. I carry it with me constantly like a security blanket. Unfortunately, my handy-dandy Dell weighs a ton and takes a lot of space while providing about an hour of battery life between charges. It is not, therefore, the ideal travel companion.

This year, I let go of the laptop and took only my iPad and smart phone. Being on Verizon, neither provided the “always connected” experience that I rely on at home, but both were great tools on the trip.

Not having access to “the cloud” presented some challenges as I prepared for the trip, although we were able to connect to WiFi at each of our lodging points. A few pieces of software proved to be critical:

Tripit – This Web service, backed up by excellent apps on both Android and iOS, was the backbone of our planning. Every booking came with a confirmation email that was forwarded to Tripit. The service then parsed out the relevant details and built an itinerary that I could share with family members that could be saved on our devices for offline access and printed out nicely as a backup. When Internet access was available, the apps also offered one-click access to flight updates, weather, maps and directions.
Offline Maps – I used DirectU Europe and MapsWithMe, each of which had their ups and downs, but they were free and proved to be very helpful in getting around town. We mostly used paper maps when wandering around, but these digital maps proved to be a serviceable backup when Google Maps wasn’t available.
eBooks – I took a few travel books along, but wound up using eBook versions more than their paper counterparts. For the most part, I checked these out from our local library using Overdrive (the service to which the library subscribes), although I also gathered some great audio tours through Rick Steve’s app.
Mindmap – This is a strange one, I know, but I used this free-form brainstorming app to organize much of the trip. As I read about destinations, I’d drop ideas into Mindmap and then dragged them around to build our itineraries for each city.

Aggregators
There are a number of sites that help find the best prices and options across a range of different sites, eventually sending visitors to those sites to actually book travel plans. The leader in this space is Kayak, which searches hundreds of sites to help users with the travel standards of hotels, cars and flights.

Visualize Travel Data
Another entrant that brings some new twists to the aggregator category is Hipmunk. Hipmunk has two major innovations that make it my new favorite site to search for flights. First, they put your flight options on a sort of Gantt chart timeline so that you can see when each leaves, lands, the length of connections and landings in a very intuitive manner. The second innovation is a proprietary sorting algorithm that they call “agony” that ranks sites not only by cost, but by the pain of flight, placing flights with multiple connections or that uses multiple airlines below some more expensive but less frustrating options.

Online Marketplaces
If you want to stay somewhere other than a hotel, there are a several great options to find a private apartment, house or even just a spare room for rent. We used Airbnb to find a one bedroom apartment with a kitchen a few blocks from the Eiffel Tower for less than we’d have spent for small hotel room in the same area. The experience is very socially-oriented. Potential renters need to message landlords before getting a commitment on the space and everything gets reviewed afterwards – guests, hosts and properties.

Google Translate
Planning and booking proved to be very easy in part because of the ever-improving translation capabilities of Google. Whenever I hit a site or review in another language, Chrome prompted me to translate and voila! Those horror stories of the language barriers getting in the way are largely a thing of the past (at least until you actually get where you’re going).

Travel is one of those industries that has been dramatically changed in the last decade through technology and continues to be a great place to look for the cutting edge innovations that we’ll be looking to apply to healthcare in the next few years.

2011 – Holy Cow!

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Eric Engelmann

It’s so easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day trenches and forget that smart, dedicated people can do incredible work over long time spans. I just finished the two hour marathon all-hands company meeting which wraps up 2011 and communicates plans for 2012. In doing so, I had the same reaction I have every year: Holy cow we got a lot done!

Here are some of the highlights:

Revenue: For the sixth year in a row, we had record revenue growth, which should easily qualify us for the Inc. 5000 list for the sixth time. To me, as a business owner, this validates that we are building products and delivering services that our clients love and want to buy more of.
New clients: We added 11 new clients, renewed contracts with 15 clients and added major new initiatives with several more. We started the year with about 30 clients representing about 200 hospitals and ended it with about 40 clients representing 500 hospitals.
Client retention: Probably most important, we’ve done an exceptional job in building strong relationships with our clients across the country: We lost zero clients to competitors and we took two from significant competitors. Over more than 10 years of working in healthcare, we’ve retained more than 93% of clients over that entire time. We have competitors who try not to lose too many in a single quarter!
Net income: 2011 was the second most profitable year we’ve ever had. As a privately-owned business, ensuring that we’re making money while we grow at a breakneck speed is obviously critical. But it also gives our clients and prospects the confidence in our ability to thrive over the long haul.
Team growth: We hired 23 people in 2011 – and we’ve built what is now pretty easily the best team in our industry. Our Professional Services team added most of these team members including new leaders Bill Basler, formerly of Basler Design Group, and Keri Buscaglia, formerly of Frank N. Magid Associates. Both have already begun major changes to our creative and interactive marketing processes. I’m excited to give them their official debut at our 2012 eHealth Symposium in April.
Software Engineering: This team made a major leap into fully automated testing in late 2011 with the intention of dramatically increasing the speed of software delivery and improving the quality of VitalSite. The engineering and QA teams did an exceptional job of, well, changing their entire software development process. The first release to demonstrate the new capabilities will be the 6.3 release in April.
Turnover rate: Geonetric is a fast growing company and it attracts a certain type of team member: people who are wicked smart, fast on their feet and like to do amazing work. Turnover rate is a big measure of how well we retain those brilliant folks. For 2011, our goal was to keep turnover 10% or less – and we ended 2011 with only 7% turnover. We’re proud of the exceptional team of experts that we’ve built and go to great lengths to build an awesome team culture and environment.
eHealth Symposium: Our clients-only 2011 eHealth Symposium was easily our largest ever, with a dozen or so sessions covering a wide array of topics. Almost every client attended. Our survey indicated 93% of sessions were “Valuable” or “Very Valuable” – a testament to the hard work of the Geonetric team in putting together an educational and enlightening experience.
Webinars: As we’ve done for many years, our freely available educational webinars were held each month, covering a number of eHealth topics. 2011 saw record attendance levels and featured many of Geonetric’s thought leaders and our clients demonstrating the amazing work we’ve done together.
Mobile sites and applications: We built our first iOS and Android applications in 2011 with many more planned to exploit the value of our VitalSite software and services teams. Almost every Geonetric client had (and has had for some time) a fully featured mobile website. Going into 2012, we have lots of new ideas to build in the mobile products we’re offering.
VitalSite 6: In April 2011 we released VitalSite 6.0 – easily the largest advance we’ve made in a single software release – with an entirely new user interface, faster performance and hundreds of improvements. VitalSite leads the way in the industry in providing rapid value to our clients and keeping them at the forefront of eHealth.
VitalSite features: We delivered 160 new features or major new improvements covering 18 areas of VitalSite’s Web and patient portal functionality. This included our patient portal qualifying for Stage 1 of Meaningful Use, major enhancements to the calendar of events with new “shopping cart” capabilities and cross-promotion tools, faster ways to build secure extranets, and hundreds more. And we’re on track to deliver about 50 new major features or improvements in the April 2012 release!
Client satisfaction: We survey clients about once a quarter on the strength of their relationship with Geonetric and the value we’re providing for them. The survey is done on a 1-6 scale, with 6 being highest. The overall score is the most important. Our goal is to average 5.0 across all clients, which is a tough goal to meet since perfect 6’s are hard to get! For the entirety of 2011, we scored 4.97 – really close to our goal, but not quite what we wanted. In my calls and visits with clients I get an overwhelmingly positive feedback. I’ve picked out a few of my favorites:
- “Our project manager does a fantastic job keeping track of projects and moving them forward. She is always available to assist with questions and issues. I feel very lucky to have her as our project manager!”
- “Great job all around. You all just keep getting better every day!”
- “Now that we’ve been a client for more than a year, I can say with certainty that I’m very happy we selected Geonetric as our Web partner! It’s been a great experience working with you to design, build and launch a new site.”

That’s not to say there’s nothing for us to work on – certainly there is! Some service processes were slow in the middle of 2011 as we ramped up and got teams organized. Some features we’ve been wanting to build for a while weren’t released in 2011 (but many are in the April 2012 release!). Some clients expressed concerns about the speed of change around here since we make decisions quickly and move on them just as fast.

All are valid concerns. That’s why we do the surveys and call or visit every single client every single year. We want to make sure we’re listening to our clients and can respond proactively to what matters to them. As we move into 2012, our clients are top of mind as we look forward and “get better every day!”

In short, I’m so very proud of the team of experts at Geonetric doing amazing work with incredible clients every day. We’re poised to do some amazing things in 2012 and I’m excited to see it all continue to grow and “Wow!” our clients!