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.

eHealth Symposium 2013: Creating, Innovating, Pushing Boundaries

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Eric Engelmann

Last week we held our 8th annual eHealth Symposium. Clients from all over the country came to Iowa to work together on pushing the boundaries of healthcare marketing. With a jam-packed agenda of topics ranging from the latest website design trends to agile marketing methods to newsjacking, clients left with brains full of new ideas, knowledge and relationships:

Heading back to the 'boro. Taking with me great information, good memories and new @geonetric friendships. #geolive

— Matt McKinney (@MattMcKNC) April 25, 2013

Clients also received a healthy dose of Iowa hospitality, which consists of overwhelming friendliness, and over-the-top food:

Taking a lot of inspiration, ideas and knowledge back from #geolive. With all the great food, probably also bringing back 5 lbs.

— karamoran (@karamoran) April 24, 2013

It helps that we hold the event at The Hotel at Kirkwood Center, which is unlike any hotel you’d expect to find in Iowa:

Is this a Vegas Hotel? No, it’s Iowa. Really. Credit: The Hotel at Kirkwood Center.

The entryway to the Hotel at Kirkwood. Gorgeous, fantastic coffee, friendly staff, and cozy places to hang out between sessions. Credit: The Hotel at Kirkwood Center.

The Hotel also happens to come with a culinary school serving up delicious meals every 2-3 hours. In fact, that’s how we kicked off this year’s event, with Chef Anthony Green, talking about ways to take an ordinarily mundane recipe, Caesar salad, and kick it up a notch or three.

Everything’s better deep fried: Chef Anthony Green kicks a mundane Caesar salad recipe up a notch by making it from scratch, then deep frying it or pureeing it.

Our clients are such good sports – they volunteered to help whip up a deep fried Caesar salad on TV in front of everyone.

You never know what you're volunteering for when your raise your hand. You might wind up making a deep fried Caesar salad from scratch.

Chef Green asks for a volunteer from the audience – did you know you’d have to touch anchovies?

Having pushed culinary boundaries, it was time to move into more serious material. Two days full of speakers and presenters covered topics showcasing the best in eHealth.

Speakers and presenters covered a dozen topics showcasing the best in eHealth.

Geonetric experts doing what they do best: helping clients get the most from their relationship with us.

John Morgan, author of Brand Against the Machine, was our keynote speaker. He blasted apart conventions about branding. His entertaining and irreverent message was pitch-perfect, as Geonetric and clients work together to shake up the staid industry of healthcare marketing.

Author and brand guru John Morgan, our keynote speaker, discussed building brands in today’s social world. Fun fact that I learned: they have a pharmacy at Disney World. You’ll have to read his book to learn why it matters. *shameless plug*

Ben Dillon presented on emerging trends in our industry, and how they affect clients.

eHealth Evangelist, Ben Dillon, presents on emerging trends in the industry.

Geonetric’s eHealth Evangelist, Ben Dillon, mesmerizes the room with that same sultry radio voice he uses in webinars. It makes statistics much more exciting!

There’s so much to learn that we used “Date-a-Geek” speed dating to make sure everyone had a chance to discuss critical topics around content, mobile vs. responsive design, and keeping up with the latest technologies and practices.

Relationships have to start somewhere. Why not start by speed dating?

With clients representing hundreds of hospitals, there’s issues that are unique to larger hospitals or rural hospitals. Our peer group roundtables let them focus on those topics, and learn what’s working and what’s not with peers facing the same challenges.

Peer group roundtables let clients with similar market needs and competitive situations discuss areas most important to them.

We’re renowned for our deep relationships with clients. One of the best ways clients get the most out of symposium is to spend some one-on-one time with their client advisors to work through the next year’s plans:

Clients love spending 1:1 time with their client advisors. And our advisors love it too!

We ended the program with a panel featuring Leslie Kelly Hall from Geonetric partner Healthwise and Gabrielle DeTora of DeTora Consulting, who gave us insights on the evolution of marketing’s role in engaging patients more deeply in their health, and how technology and data are fundamentally changing the role of marketing in healthcare.

Panelists Leslie Kelly Hall and Gabrielle DeTora gave an important outside perspective on eHealth.

@lesliekellyhall says “Empower patients and give them tools that allow them to do things for themselves.” #geolive twitter.com/HW_JoAnna/stat…

— JoAnna Brogdon (@HW_JoAnna) April 24, 2013

To add a little serendipitous fun, we hid Amazon gift certificates and gave out clues:

We have a winner! Congratulations Heather on finding the Amazon gift card – on your birthday no less! http://t.co/iVa0AsfsSt #geolive #hbd

— Geonetric (@geonetric) April 24, 2013

By the end of the day, with brains overflowing, we had switched to beer while playing darts, pool, and laughing at a local pub, followed by a good night’s sleep back at The Hotel.

Geonetric upstairs: Closed to the public

Sure, we’ll rent out the whole floor of a bar for a party. Of course we brought the deep fried green beans if you’re hungry.

Our post-Symposium surveys reveal that clients loved the event, learned a lot, made new friends, and are excited to come back! We’re already planning for the 2014 eHealth Symposium, to push the boundaries even further! We might even find something else tasty to deep fry.

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:

What Health Reform Means for the Healthcare Web

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Ben Dillon

We’ve written quite a lot about health reform in its various forms including Meaningful Use, ACOs, ACA, and medical home. But a question that I received this week made me realize that I’ve never written specifically about health reform’s impact on your hospital’s online strategy.

Greater Organization Complexity

Merging, acquiring, and employing docs and the many flavors of business relationship between hospitals, clinics and insurers that are emerging under reform means that your brand is getting pretty complicated. This isn’t just a question about names and logos – your website has suddenly become the front door to a very complex and likely changing mix of doctors and services. Your job is to make it simple for every site visitor to get the information they want. I strongly recommend our webinar on using the Web to support complex organizations to dive into the topic in greater detail.

Promoting a Different Set of Services

The mix of services, where they’re promoted and who receives that promotion will be changing as changing payment models come into play. For example, primary care promises to be a central strategic offering as medical home models become the norm. Be prepared to provide better support for more service lines digitally and look to take those offerings to health consumers in new and different ways.

Increased Focus on Physicians

A new focus on employed physicians means many of you will be allowed to promote certain doctors for the first time and there’s now a strategic imperative to fill some waiting rooms! That means that you’ll be marketing physicians more than ever before.

Keep in mind, though, that marketing physicians doesn’t mean a bunch of advertising for hundreds of individual doctors. It means finding how to differentiate their practice and helping the right patients get connected to them. Most advertising should represent the organization or particular service offerings rather than physicians (see “Relationships,” below).

Wellness and Sickness

While we’ll need to help health consumers navigate the system when something’s wrong, nothing will be more profitable for our organizations in the future than keeping our patients healthy. Building digital tools and content that support good health and the management of chronic conditions will become very important. There may also be a role for digital-based communities for these areas as well.

Relationships

Some of the changes coming along could make healthcare a very transactional business. Greater use of convenient care services and physician extenders mean that the relationship that was once central to primary care – that between physician and patient – is just not going to be as central in the future.

But the goal isn’t to make the system transactional. The whole point of medical home is to provide more coordinated care across a given patient’s needs.

We therefore need to replace (or at least supplement) the relationship between patient and doctor with one between patient and health system. How do we do that? Begin by providing a single point of access to a patient’s information through a patient portal across all of their interactions with the health system – primary care, specialists, emergency department, classes, and support groups. The system should also provide all of the important health and appointment reminders to the patient in a consistent, coordinated way. That is pretty difficult without a customer relationship management system that works across secure digital channels, traditional mail and inbound and outbound call center operations.

What Won’t Reform Impact?

Looking at all of those changes together suggests that the role of the Web is going to change pretty dramatically in the coming years. Today, we’re there to build awareness and support transactions. But in the future we’re going to have a greater role to play throughout the stages of a patient’s relationship with our organization, from health consumer – proactively reaching out, building awareness, guiding them to access the system in appropriate ways, and promoting wellness as the foundation of their relationship with the health system – to patients – being their gateway to the healthcare system, central point for coordination of care, conduit to support resources from healthcare professionals and peers and their road map for better management of their health.

SHSMD Connects Us Together in a Time of Great Change

Posted on September 26, 2012 by Ben Dillon

Another SHSMD Annual Conference has come and gone. The theme this year, “Connections 2012,” was appropriate, as we attempt as an industry to tie our rafts together to better weather the storm on the horizon.

What follows are my big take-aways from the meeting. Whether you were at the meeting in Philadelphia or just followed the conversation on Twitter, I hope you’ll share your thoughts on the conference in the comments section of this post.

Bring your experience to the table, but let go of your preconceptions.

There were a lot of disciplines represented at the conference, and from strategists to marketers to physician’s liaisons, we’re all trying to define what our industry and our own organizations will look like in just a few years’ time. What healthcare gets delivered, where it’s delivered, who does the delivery and, of course, the economics supporting it along the way are all in flux.

It’s the time of transition which promises to be most challenging for our organizations. Dr. Maulik Joshi, PhD, President of HRET, the American Hospital Association’s research foundation, said it best, “We stand with one foot on the dock and the other on the boat.” Healthcare organizations will be under strain as we seek to find new models and structures that work, effectively disassembling and reassembling the airplane while having to keep it in the air throughout the entire process.

As a result, the conference was full of sessions on physician engagement strategies, including ones focused on how to determine whether or not to acquire physician practices, how to deploy innovative primary care models, how to roll out bundled services and how to best the care continuum.

At the center of this conversation was Prof. Michael Useem’s general session on the need for decisive leadership during the period ahead. Inspiring, motivating and directing your staff, keeping them engaged through challenges, and making decisions with less information than you might want will be critical. Everything is changing, so trying to stay in your comfort zone, doing things the way you always have is a surefire way to fail.

Continue reading →

The Majority of Consumers Don’t Need a Hospital

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Heather Stanley

Here at Geonetric we’re big fans of Chris Bevolo’s book Joe Public Doesn’t Care About Your Hospital. So I was excited when Ben reached out to Chris in his article Embracing Wellness Online featured in the July/August 2012 issue of Healthcare Strategy Alert! In the article, Ben and Chris explain how too often what hospitals market is sick care not healthcare – and they discuss how much of an opportunity there is for marketing wellness.

Ben goes on to discuss how to leverage the Web to build awareness for wellness programs and features case studies from a few of our clients, including: Owensboro Medical Health System, Owensboro, KY; Crozer-Keystone Health System’s Healthplex® Sports Club, Springfield, PA; Overlake Hospital Medical Center, Bellevue, WA; and Advocate Health Care, Oak Brook, IL.

From promoting fitness facilities to sponsoring 5Ks, these organizations are pros at using the Web, social media and even QR codes to connect with their communities. They’re establishing relationships with people that might not need a doctor or typical hospital services. And as an added benefit, they’re reinforcing their commitment to building healthier local communities.

Check out the article and learn how to leverage the Web and social media platforms to build awareness for your organization’s wellness initiatives.

Put Your Best Foot Forward

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Ben Dillon

It’s hard for health systems to find blue oceans. I’m referring to blue ocean business strategies – where your organization differentiates itself so well that competition is irrelevant.

Healthcare organizations tend to have strong brand recognition, but weak brand differentiation. It’s difficult for patients to recognize what makes you different from competitors, or perhaps they simply don’t care. Just as often, for a given service line, there really isn’t much that actually makes an organization truly different.

As I wrote this time last year, “Think back to the classic definition of what marketing is – the four P’s – product, price, promotion and place. Healthcare marketers are deeply involved in promotion, but how often do you get to direct where your services are delivered or set what they cost? Marketers in healthcare rarely even have the opportunity to determine what services will be delivered.”

Healthcare marketers have a particularly tough job with differentiation. Fortunately, there are areas in which you do have control:

Campaigns, marketing materials, employee communications
Events (health fairs, foundation galas)
Website
Social media and other digital outreach

There is a great untapped opportunity to differentiate organizations through the Web. Consumers’ perceptions of healthcare organizations are mostly driven by the experiences they have. Because they are unable to assess clinical competency, their experiences craft their perceptions on healthcare quality .

So when you do great things online (an area marketers do control), it has an opportunity to change the patient experience (which patients value). You can use this to differentiate your organization in the marketplace.

Hospitals are using the Web to make it easier for patients to work with them and creating personalized, tailored experiences. When you do these things, are you promoting them?

For example, are you promoting your convenient online appointments in TV ads, putting your live ER wait times on billboards and getting detailed news coverage for your patient portal? Some online capabilities are differentiators on their own, and they should be promoted to strengthen and reinforce the brand in the marketplace. Other times, they’re a newsworthy discussion item that allows you to communicate about something else you are doing at the organization.

In each case, they’re opportunities to do something different and that is often a rare commodity. Healthcare organizations that are winning this game do so by seizing these opportunities and making the most of them.

Join us for our webinar Tell Your Story and Promote Your Online Initiatives on February 16 at 3:00 p.m. CT to learn how your organization can more effectively promote your online investments.

Best of the Best 2011

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Nicole Knoll

Month after month, Geonetric shares expertise in eHealth hot topics through free educational webinars, the Revolution Report eNewsletter and on Twitter. As 2011 comes to a close, we were curious to see which topics stood out as the most influential of the year. So here you have it, our top five webinars, eHealth articles and Tweets of 2011.

Geonetric’s top five webinars of 2011

Geonetric’s top five articles of 2011

Geonetric’s top five Tweets of 2011

You can feel the excitement in the air. VitalSite 6, the next generation of our CMS platform, is released today! http://ow.ly/4I7PW
Congrats @GenesisHCS on your new website and mobile site! More great things to come! http://ow.ly/6Gug7
What does influence really mean in a Web 2.0 world? http://ow.ly/4SsrH #hcsm
Geonetric aligns with leading Iowa companies to implement Lean culture and drive process improvement: http://ow.ly/4B8Ci
When I’m wrong I’m really wrong… and here comes Google+ http://ow.ly/5QDTP

You can view our articles, white papers, webinars and more in our eHealth resource center.

Looking forward to 2012, we can’t wait to share more resources on timely eHealth topics with you. To get started you can view our upcoming webinars on how to bring more consistency to your offline and online initiatives.

Happy New Year from Geonetric!

How Can I Use the Web to Improve the Health of My Community?

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Nicole Knoll

Find out the answer to this very question in Ben Dillon’s article in the July 2011 issue of eHealthcare Strategy & Trends.

Due to health reform, hospitals are increasingly focused on wellness and are turning to the Web as a tool to promote and manage these initiatives. In Ben’s Ask the Expert article, he share examples of healthcare systems that have successfully utilized the Web to motivate, educate and build awareness of their wellness programs to promote healthy behaviors in their communities. He also addresses the benefits of turning to the Web and the future of wellness promotion.

A New Approach to Patient Motivation

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Ben Dillon

Friday’s keynote by Daniel Pink took a scientific look at what motivates people to really perform. After Thursday’s session on inspiration I was looking for a new perspective and was not disappointed.

At a certain level, motivation is like gravity. We all have an intuitive understanding of what it is and how it works, but we don’t always understand how the underlying mechanisms actually work.

Unfortunately, when it comes to motivation, our intuition often fails us. For simple problems, the classic carrot and stick approach to shaping behavior does work to improve performance. Unfortunately, when we try to apply those techniques to complex or conceptual problems, they typically make performance worse.

Pink suggests that the key to motivating for great performance and job satisfaction comes from three components:

Autonomy – control over your day, control over what you do and control over how you do it
Mastery - the desire to get better and better at something that matters
Purpose – dedication to a cause greater than oneself

He’s very persuasive in his arguments. If you question his approach, I’d encourage you to read his book, Drive!

Now, Mr. Pink talked about all of this in terms of making your team effective. I’d rather look at it in terms of motivating patients. Whether encouraging patients to take their medications, lose weight or manage their blood sugar, it’s difficult to get patients to follow doctors’ orders. Let’s look at how we might apply his model to these scenarios.

Autonomy – We all want more control in our lives. So if you take advantage of even small opportunities to tailor a program, you will likely see improvements in adherence and satisfaction. When programs try to simplify by adding details and specifics while eliminating the need to make decisions, it actually ends up being counterproductive. This is because the only decision left to the patient is to choose not to comply. Instead, educate the patient about the items that they need to do and then let them set their own priorities .
Mastery – Rather than overwhelming patients with all aspects of a life-changing program at once, gradually bring in new elements and ways to see how they’re improving. Add and refine the steps they’re taking and help them recognize and celebrate ongoing improvement.
Purpose - Perhaps the most critical component of this approach to motivation is to connect the healthy behaviors to a greater cause. Patients are generally pretty unhappy with their ailments. But, in many cases, they’re further annoyed by the inconveniences of treatments and therapies.

What Pink really highlights with his approach to motivation is the notion of framing. Rather than encouraging one set of unpleasantness in the form of treatment as a path to eliminating the unpleasantness of the problem condition, patients need to understand what they gain in the form of tangible value. It’s a classic feature/benefit split and we’re busy selling features today.

It’s a different piece of the puzzle as we look at the process of tackling health challenges. Simply telling a patient what should be done often fails to lead patients to follow through. Daniel Pink’s approach has potential as a framework for enabling sustainable health changes in the future.

Communications as a Strategic Differentiator for Your Health System

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Ben Dillon

We’ve been talking a lot about changes on the horizon – the role of wellness, the relationship between the cost and quality of healthcare, and the business opportunities available to organizations that can adapt to the changing landscape. As we look to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (health reform legislation), HITECH and meaningful use, accountable care and medical homes, these changes are being motivated by the same set of simple drivers:

The current cost of care is too high
The healthcare system is overly dependent on labor
Given what we spend, our population isn’t very healthy

The existing model is not equipped to fix these problems. In the future, the U.S. healthcare system will need to be far more effective with the financial resources available. It’s not a matter of trying to shift care delivery from doctors to nurse practitioners and physician assistants. The care model needs to change.

One change that needs to happen is how we use technology to communicate with consumers and patients. Healthcare is 90 percent communications – most of what doctors do today is talk and listen. But almost all of that activity comes during a brief face-to-face meeting a few times per year. Few patients make life changes based on these interactions, and it’s unreasonable for us to expect they would.

Technology can help us engage with consumers and patients while also adapting to the varying levels of care they require. It allows us to communicate with them wherever they are. And it often requires little or no direct human intervention.

Here are some ways we should be communicating with consumers online:

Alerts and reminders
Service and screening recommendations
Coaching to help patients understand their personal risks
Educational materials that teach patients about diseases, medications and assist them in the decision making process for treatment options
Coaching to help prevent the emergence of chronic health conditions
Support systems to assist patients in the proper and effective management of chronic health conditions
Support and education after an acute issue, such as following a surgery or hospital stay
Support for informal caregivers

This list is by no means comprehensive. Still very little of this happens today. Some of the communications, such as reminders, can be automated while other items, such as coaching, require a combination of staff involvement and self-management tools.

The interactions range from clinical to administrative, vary in frequency and utilize a variety of channels including secure email, patient portals, video conferencing, text messaging, automated calling and mailings. The common thread is the patients and their specific situation and needs.

Of course, doing all of this successfully requires a tremendous coordination of messaging. Organizations will need to coordinate their marketing messages, hospital messages and clinic messages using personalized and targeted interactions across a wide range of channels. When done well, this is an opportunity to build a relationship with patients and consumers.

Wellness is Not the Opposite of Illness

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Ben Dillon

I’ve been thinking about wellness lately. No surprise, really, as we’re in the middle of a three month webinar series all about wellness. I’ve been thinking about the ways the healthcare industry needs to shift and the role wellness promotion, prevention and early detection will play in that transition.

One way of looking at this change is to stop viewing the system as one physician focusing on the needs of one patient, and instead focus on how to best manage the overall health of a population of patients.

It seems like a small change. Physicians certainly tell their patients to make better lifestyle choices. And when a physician treats patient after patient, don’t they end up treating a population? The answer, unfortunately, is no. Those physicians aren’t reaching all of the people who need services or approaching the early causative factors that lead to disease in a systematic, consistent way. Most of the physician’s energies flow into diagnosing and treating issues that have already presented themselves. This is a physician’s training and it’s how they get paid.

Instead, we need to look at the problem from a public health perspective. An annual check-up isn’t sufficient to facilitate lifestyle changes. Physicians often point their patients to classes and fitness facilities as a longer-term reinforcement tool, but there’s rarely any follow-up to see if they ever signed up or attended.

This paradigm shift can be felt from the patient’s side of things, too. For example, this patient blogger, with rheumatoid arthritis, is staring down the reality that making healthy choices in life doesn’t keep people from getting sick.

It’s the difference between shifting the percentages – the chance that you’ll become ill – and the personal reality when you’re the one who loses the roll of the dice. It seems unfair that when you do the right things –stay active, eat right, and lose weight – you sometimes end up with a debilitating illness anyway.

This is part of the challenge faced by health consumers as they evaluate care options. Sure the risk of some bad thing happening is 50% higher in one place than another, but in the end if that works out to 3% rather than 2%, it’s simply not meaningful.

When we start looking at the problem on this larger public health scale, the percentages become meaningful. The one percent differences work out to dozens of patients and the problem becomes important enough to get someone’s attention – the payback is worth the time and effort required to improve.

These programs are most effective with the participation of the primary care team. Insurers have tried for years to institute programs for active disease management with little in the way of success. This is more an issue of the source of the offered assistance rather than the quality of the programs themselves.

There’s a need to add a new set of programs into the toolkit at the physician office which are proactive, targeted and persistent. It begins with the basics, such as identifying which patients are overdue for a regular physical. But it continues with actively reaching out to at-risk patients, then motivating, educating and supporting preventive activities, chronic condition management and recovery from procedures and diseases.

Certainly technology plays a role, but technology islands have failed to make a difference so far. What matters is when technology is placed into care experience. When the physician prescribes online tools. When care team members monitor and engage through those tools. When the care model shifts to be about the patient rather than about the encounter. These are the ways that large-scale change becomes a reality.

The tools exist or can be built. The challenge now is getting the healthcare system moving to embrace a new future.

Counting Quality?

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Ben Dillon

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

–Albert Einstein

There’s been much talk about hospital quality in recent years. We measure and report more and more metrics, as each new piece of healthcare legislation comes with new reporting requirements. We’re constantly measuring care data, but in many ways, we’re still far from where we need to be.

It seems we have a tough time determining what we should be measuring. What numbers really matter? Hospitals report metrics – but often disagree with the metrics or how they’re calculated. Patients judge healthcare organizations through a totally different lens.

A clear example of this appeared in Friday’s USA Today. USA Today compared top-rated hospitals, according to the new HCAHPS survey of patient experience, with Medicare mortality data from www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov. Top ranks from the patient experience survey were often at odds with top ranks from the mortality data survey. Patients often liked hospitals that had mediocre or even poor outcomes and vice versa.

So this leads to a single fundamental question: what is quality?

I’ve made the case in the past that, for patients, quality is about what they experience. If patients could assess the clinical competency of their doctors, then they wouldn’t need doctors…they would be doctors.

Providing excellent care is very, very important. It just doesn’t mean the same thing to every organization or every audience.

To patients, quality is about the attention they receive from the receptionist, the bedside manner of the physician, and how long they’re forced to wait. They have no personal reference point with the statistical probabilities that represent our official view of quality. A one percent shift in mortality rates may be statistically significant, but it isn’t meaningful to most health consumers.

So, what does this mean for how we communicate quality?

Your organization needs to determine how it defines quality. This is not the same as rationalizing your current quality situation. Is quality strictly a set of metrics, or is it the institutional knowledge that results from performing volumes of particular procedures? Is your mortality rate most important or do you handle the most complex procedures on the sickest patients?

Patients, the media and job-seeking physicians look at your numbers when evaluating your organization. So when you present your quality metrics, be sure to give them context. What does five percent actually mean? It is good or bad? Increasing or decreasing? If you’re not happy with the number, how are you addressing the issue? All of this helps your audience judge the care system you have in place.

Your website provides the opportunity to tell your quality story. But keep in mind – the numbers aren’t the story. They are the facts that support the narrative. You still need the narrative.

Most of all, present the information where it matters – connected with the appropriate services. If you have a compelling quality story, be sure consumers find it when they’re evaluating you as a care option. In the end, that’s what counts.

When to Use a Microsite vs. a Landing Page

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Linda Barnes

When promoting a campaign, when should you develop a microsite vs. a landing page? This simple question has generated many conversations here at Geonetric, especially as we work with clients to promote their wellness campaigns online. And like many questions, the answer is: it depends.

Microsites
Let’s start by defining microsites. A microsite is a mini website separate from the hospital’s main website. Microsites are typically small sites – with 3-10 pages. What makes them different to a small website is that microsites are usually built to be promotion specific – they focus on a specific topic or target a specific audience. Microsites deviate from the organizational site in terms of design, colors, logos, and messaging.

There are several reasons why you may need to create a microsite:

You are launching a campaign: Microsites may be created to promote a specific campaign, such as an educational campaign, centennial celebration, or wellness event. The microsite can provide content, design, and calls to action that coordinate with the campaign. Check out National Jewish Health’s microsite created to promote its Family Air Care® Indoor Allergens and Mold Test Kit . The site contains pages of relevant content and clearly directs visitors to order the kit.
You have multiple facilities: Health systems with many facilities may choose to promote them using microsites. These microsites typically contain similar branding elements as the main website, but can better target the individual facility’s region and dig deeper into its services. Genesis Health System created a microsite for its Mercer County Hospital that contains a similar look as its organizational site.
You want to target a specific audience or promote a specific brand: Hospitals often offer services that attract an audience that’s different than the organizational website. Perhaps you offer a health facility and want to attract consumers looking for wellness services. Perhaps you have a college of nursing program and want to target students. Or perhaps you have a children’s center that needs a more fun, personable site. The Reginald S. Lourie Center for Infants and Young Children, part of Adventist Healthcare, recently launched a microsite to cater to parents and their children as well as build awareness of its individual brand.

Microsites help you promote a product or service with detailed, relevant content. Because of that focused content, microsites can produce more conversions than the organizational website and may even help with improving organic search rankings for the topic.

Landing pages
Landing pages are typically one-page sites. Like a microsite, they focus on driving visitors to take an action. Landing pages are most often used as part of a temporary inbound marketing campaign where the call to action or offer is the focus on the page. Landing pages typically use: 1) images and a look that coordinates with the inbound marketing effort, 2) very little navigation, and 3) a clear call to action on the page. For a great example, check out Rush-Copley’s breast health SEM campaign. The keyword “mammogram” takes visitors to a landing page that encourages them to schedule an appointment.

When to use microsites vs. landing pages
There isn’t one answer to the question of when to use a microsite vs. a landing page. Many factors help determine the best approach:

Goals
Audience
Complexity of the topic
Content
Internal processes
Call to action
Budget

It really depends on your specific situation. Regardless of the option you select, they both help you provide targeted content that drives visitors to take an action. They are easier to develop than organizational sites, since they aren’t as deep or wide in scope. And using analytics, both mircosites and landing pages allow you to track everything from number of visitors to conversions. So to answer the question, it does depend. But both options will help you successfully promote your services and campaigns.

Geonetric can help you determine if you should create a microsite or landing page. Check out these microsite success stories and then contact us to learn more.

Applying Gamification to Wellness

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Ben Dillon

Computer and video gaming is a massive industry, consuming millions of hours of people’s time every year. When you step back and watch, you find the activities in these games are often repetitive, monotonous, frustrating and sometimes painful. Find 50 widgets. Kill 100 critters. Collect 1,000 coins. It’s a wonder that gamers invest so much time into the gaming grind.

There are other activities we’d like to have people do that can feel a lot like the tedious parts of these games. Repetitive. Monotonous. Sounds like a treadmill. Frustrating. Painful. Reminiscent of the routine diabetics go through to check their blood sugar.

Wellness activities look and feel a lot like those gaming activities. So why is wellness so hard when games are so incredibly addictive?

Enter the new field of gamification – a new twist on behavioral economics using video games to test how millions of consumers can be motivated to perform behaviors they otherwise wouldn’t do. It’s exactly what we need to encourage health consumers to make better decisions – eat better, exercise, take their medications and manage chronic conditions before they get out of control.

Let’s look at how some gamification concepts might be implemented in wellness programs, particularly if the programs have a strong online component:

Recognition – It’s great to set goals for wellness programs as long as they don’t feel overwhelming and unachievable. Adding consistent, manageable goals that encourage recognition and reward are motivating. Goals such as “lose 75 pounds” or “keep your blood pressure under 120/80″ may be what you’re shooting for, but start with “set up your profile,” “perform 30 minutes of activity every day for a week,” or “lose your first five pounds.”
Metrics - Tracking matters. Providing participants with the ability to see how they’re performing toward their goal can be very effective. Setting daily step targets or using a pedometer help people get active. Tracking everything they eat against a daily limit, like in the Weight Watchers® program, help people manage calories. And monitors like the BodyBugg help people measure the difference between what they’re burning and what they eat.
Rewards – Rewards also help. Cash can work, but that gets expensive. Consider recognition in the form of an honorific (think Foursquare badges or “my kid’s an honor student” bumper stickers). Virtual currency can work well too. Set up a point system and award points to participants who complete different activities or reach specific goals. Points can be used to foster competition or buy incentives like water bottles or fitness center passes.
Leaderboards – Certain personalities thrive on competitions – especially when competing against others individually or in teams. Competition works best when individuals can see where they stand, and a great way to employ this online is through a leaderboard. The best designs for leaderboards allow individuals to see how far they are from reaching the team ahead of them and how closely they’re being chased.
Onboarding – The first few minutes of interaction sets the stage – it takes just a few minutes to engage or discourage potential participants. For the ideal onboarding experience, immediately begin with an activity that takes a few minutes – nothing too difficult – and then reward or recognize participants when they complete it. After they receive that first reward, ask them to sign up (to record their accomplishment).

These ideas just scratch the surface of how you can promote wellness activities. We can glean many more ideas from the gaming industry. If you’re contemplating implementing wellness activities in your community, it wouldn’t hurt to approach your programs as games and add ways to motivate and reward participants throughout the program. It takes a lot of work to change behaviors, but we all know it’s worth it.

For more ideas on how to implement successful wellness programs, join us for our webinar Marketing Wellness Initiatives: A Roundtable on August 18th. Representatives from four hospital groups will discuss how they implemented and promoted wellness activities, including how some of them implemented gamification tactics to keep participants motivated.