Category Archives: Value

eHealth Symposium 2013: Creating, Innovating, Pushing Boundaries

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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:

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

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.

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.

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.

Chef Anthony Green kicks a mundane Caesar salad recipe up a notch.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Q1 2013 Client Satisfaction Results

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If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you know we’re relentless about measuring Client Satisfaction and posting it here.

Last quarter, and most of 2012, the primary pain point our clients revealed in our Client Satisfaction survey was issues with deployment of our software. So for the past few months we’ve been implementing our new push button automated deployment system, which takes a single click to do, is more reliable, and much faster.

We looked with anticipation to the Q1 2013 survey to see if the changes had any effect. The results are in, and we had the highest overall score we’ve ever gotten: 5.27 on a scale of 1-6.

Client Satisfaction - Overall Score - Q1 2013

Client Satisfaction – Overall Score – Q1 2013

Clients also commented positively on how we’re deeply aligning our work together on the website to their corporate goals. In many cases, we’re helping clients draft eHealth goals in the first place. We also got kudos for our new Responsive Marketing Campaigns that produced amazing results for Crozer-Keystone Health System. And, we got a bunch of comments about the attentiveness and thoroughness of our client advisors that regularly meet with clients and help them manage their projects.

That said, there were some areas for us to work on that clients identified. Two came up in particular:

  • Some clients expressed that they didn’t find our current clients-only GeoLabs as useful as they could be. So we’re going to revamp them this summer.
  • A few clients mentioned that certain types of services take longer than they should. We agree; our no-hierarchy peer-accountable culture initiative is designed to address exactly this problem. We should see an impact from these changes over the next few months.

All in all, getting the highest overall score we’ve ever gotten is a great way to start 2013! We’re excited about the improvements we’re making and the incredible work we’re doing with our clients every day!

No Hiding Here: What We Do with Client Satisfaction Feedback

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Yesterday I posted the key takeaways from our quarterly client satisfaction survey. Some questions we hear about it is: where does the data go? Who sees it? How do you use it?

It’s an interesting set of questions, because the answers have evolved a lot in the past few years.

It used to be that we’d collect the data and then just a couple of us would pick some action items to be done and distribute them through the organization. This had the advantage of letting us hide anything we didn’t want everyone to know about, or we didn’t want to deal with yet. But now it’s a bit different. We’ve matured a lot as a company, and we’ve been eschewing top-down management methods and empowering teams to solve problems. Sharing the data widely forces us to face candid feedback even if it’s uncomfortable. Therefore, we share the data very widely within the company, and only in a few cases make it anonymous when we feel it must be.

Who Sees it and Takes Action Based on it?

The data from the client satisfaction survey is:

  • Viewed in its entirety, verbatim, by the entire Geonetric leadership team – 12 people – and discussed and debated for a couple of hours. We want to make sure that the team charged with guiding Geonetric forward is 100% clear on whether we’re accomplishing our mission to “Wow!” clients. We identify trends and propose possible ways to address shortcomings or pass along kudos to teams doing things right.
  • Client-by-client scores and most client comments are shared with the Account Managers and Project Managers to give them feedback on areas they’re excelling or failing to meet expectations. AMs and PMs tend to have the closest relationships with clients and often can best address issues. In almost every case, the surveys are confirming what the AMs and PMs already know, but the survey helps us stay focused on resolving any outstanding issues, or illuminating exceptional work that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
  • Teams, like our software development team or design team, are given the scores for their respective areas of influence through the company meetings, where we present the aggregate scores in each of 12 categories in front of everyone. Depending on the feedback, they might choose to take action within their realm of control.
  • The monthly company meeting after the survey closes includes a discussion and rank of every client from best-scoring to lowest scoring: everyone knows where every client stands at that point.

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

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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.”

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Why We’re Here: Updating Our Mission Statement

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Mission statements are usually written early in a company’s history, then put on a plaque and promptly forgotten by everyone.

At Geonetric, we use ours a little differently. For example, the mission statement is the very first slide of every monthly company meeting, because it’s just that important. I put it there to remind us every month why we are here, as a company, doing this – rather than something else.

Up until last week, Geonetric’s mission statement was:

To build an exceptional team of experts to do revolutionary work for our clients.

That may not sound very exciting to you, but we thought carefully about those words and the placement of those words. As you can read in the statement, we focus first on the idea of building an “exceptional team:” amazing, smart people that work well together. It is pretty common for new team members to be a bit dazed the first few weeks as they adjust to the idea that there are so many brilliant people under one roof. The people here care about where the company is going. They’re engaged. They want Geonetric to succeed. If the new hire just arrived from the typical corporate world, it’s a bit shocking, actually – and that’s the point. Building an exceptional team is hard, and it’s the most important reason we’re here.

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

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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!

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.

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[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.