Exclusive Interview with Our Guest Product Owner

Posted on September 5, 2012 by David Sturtz

We work hard to ensure our VitalSite content management system is the best on the market. And we’re lucky enough to work with experts in many disciplines – not just software development. We routinely reach out to our internal experts to get advice and recommendations to ensure our software meets evolving needs.

For one of our recent development sprints we invited Casey Hansen, Geonetric’s expert on all things Google, to join the VitalSite team as a guest product owner. Casey brought a backlog of ideas for enhancing the search engine optimization features of VitalSite. I sat down with him to find out how it went.

DS: Thanks for being part of the development team this sprint. Could you explain which part of the development process you were included in?

CH: I was involved in the planning process and the daily standups to see how the product team works through a sprint and overcomes obstacles. It was eye-opening to see how all the different pieces affect each other.

DS: It’s a constant process of prioritization. Were there other surprising aspects of the development process?

CH: The biggest surprise was to see how something that seems simple can actually be quite complex. What will that change affect here? There? Across the product? What do we do if this happens? What do we do if that happens? When you’re the one with the idea, you don’t think about all of the details. The simplest little feature can have waterfall effects. It’s really enlightening to understand the process.

DS: One of the features that you worked on was an enhancement to encourage authors to provide good metadata for the content they create. How do you think the feature will boost search engine optimization?

CH: It’s going to help make sure that some of the basics are on the pages, that they don’t get left out, and that they conform to standards. In my experience, clients have multiple people putting content in and it’s easy for pages to get published with no metadata, or inconsistent metadata. This feature is going to help guide that process.

Continue reading →

New Geonetric Website – Our Turn to Show Off a Bit!

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Eric Engelmann

We get to celebrate client website and portal launches all the time – it’s a fantastic milestone as we work together with our clients to build the best in eHealth. The vast majority of our efforts around here goes to our clients, as it should.

But yesterday, we also launched a complete overhaul of our own website, featuring a number of innovative new capabilities and tons of content useful to our industry.

Specifically:

The site runs on the latest release of our award-winning VitalSite software – making it incredibly easy for our team to update and manage over time.
The new site is a fully responsive design that beautifully adapts to any platform: desktop computer, laptop, tablet, or mobile phone. Check it out!
We’re committed to discussing and promoting innovation in the eHealth industry, so we’ve provided a plethora of resources, all available for free to our prospects and clients (or competitors) to learn from, including:
- More than 20 of our free webinars for the eHealth industry, covering topics from patient portals to search engine optimization – all in video, podcast or PDF format.
- Dozens of articles and white papers on complex topics like mobile sites, how to promote service lines online and content strategy.
- Links to all of our client sites – we’re proud of every single one, so we put them all up there – as well as success stories and testimonials.
- We’ve also added lots of new content about the amazing experts on our team and what it’s like to work here.

Take a look, and let us know what you think.

Ignore Your Home Page

Posted on August 2, 2012 by David Sturtz

Last week Jonah Peretti, co-founder of BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, shared his advice for Marissa Mayer, the former Google executive who was recently appointed president and CEO of Yahoo!:

“It is amazing how having a huge home page can be a curse. People start fighting over existing traffic instead of trying to make awesome new things that are exciting enough to attract their own audience. Marissa Mayer should exclude home page traffic from all metrics used to evaluate performance…”

It’s a great thought experiment. If the product you’re promoting – whether that’s a service line, facility, care provider, event, or simply information – isn’t enough to draw visits on its own, then putting a link on the home page isn’t the solution.

In short: if you’re still focused on driving traffic to your home page, you’re missing the point.

Check the stats for your site and, if you’re like most Geonetric clients, you’ll find that 80-95% of pageviews are for pages other than the home page. So how do you make the most of traffic that is distributed across thousands of pages?

Geonetric’s VitalSite content management system has a great answer to this question – it’s something we call SmartPanels. All content in VitalSite can be tagged, organizing it for navigation and searching. Using these tags, site administrators can efficiently show links to highly relevant content in multiple ways across thousands of pages. And because it’s all driven by VitalSite, keeping all of those links up-to-date happens automatically.

SmartPanels can be used to drive calls-to-action, promote care providers, highlight upcoming events, and more. They interconnect all of the non-home page content on your site, making the most of all of those pageviews.

Learn more about VitalSite’s SmartPanels in this short video, then contact us for a demo.

What’s This Thing Gonna Cost?

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Ben Dillon

Budget time is coming up and if a major upgrade to your Web operations is in the stars for you, figuring out where to begin can be a challenge. Website redesigns are one of those items that most organizations don’t do often. And with changes in the industry and in consumers’ expectations, what’s gotten you by in the past doesn’t necessarily provide you with a path for future success.

The question of what a major site redesign really costs has a very simple answer: it depends. This all comes down to the classic project management triangle. There are three factors that are interdependent – scope, cost and time. Increase the scope and costs go up. Cut the budget and functionality suffers. Set a tight timeline, and you’ll feel pressure on the scope and costs along the way.

To help sort this out, clearly separate your “must have” and “nice to have” items. If you absolutely must have a new site in place by June 30, 2013 because your current vendor will pull the plug on your existing site that day, then that’s a must have. When it comes to scope, you should attempt to budget for the items you want, but it’s useful to understand what you’re willing to give up if you don’t receive all of the funds you’ve requested.

In addition to the items you can’t live without, there are some items that are easy to overlook but can make a huge difference in the final deliverable:

Software licensing: You don’t want to build your site using Microsoft Word®. Hospital Web properties require robust enterprise content management systems. Keep in mind, very little enterprise software is purchased. Instead, it’s licensed on a monthly or yearly basis, making the up-front costs much less than they were in the past, and this structure allows you to receive regular upgrades. Just don’t forget to plan for license fees in subsequent budget years.
Hosting: Hospital websites don’t belong on a $19.95/year Web hosting solution. You want something with security, redundancy and high performance. Setting up such an environment from scratch is a six-figure investment. External hosting is a steal at prices around a thousand dollars a month and is typically more redundant than what you would create internally.
Project management: Nothing is more important to managing a website redesign than the project management expertise that keeps everyone on track. Despite this, too many organizations attempt to short change this area, preferring to invest in “doing” over “planning.” They inevitably pay the price through timing conflicts, rework and schedule overruns.

There are many questions to answer and factors to consider when determining what you’ll need to budget to make your new website a reality. Fortunately, Geonetric is here to help. We have two resources that you’ll find invaluable as you go down this road. First is our latest white paper Top 10 Cost Considerations When Approaching a Redesign and the second is our upcoming June webinar, Budgeting for a Successful Website Redesign, that will walk you through the process.

Unclutter Your Site

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Michelle LeCompte

Most of us start the new year full of energy, determined to clear the decks and tackle new projects. Some of us at Geonetric have spent the past week in “clearing” mode: recycling documents, archiving information, purging duplicate files. The result is a clean and uncluttered workspace – or at least a lot less cluttered than it was – one where we can readily find the information we need without tripping over outdated stuff or running into dead ends.

As we worked, it became easier to say “yes” to the perennial question – “Are you sure you want to permanently delete this file?” – especially when the information was several years old or saved in multiple locations.

The whole process got me thinking about how the practice of clearing our workspaces needs to extend to our websites. Websites are workspaces for our online audiences as they seek to find directions and phone numbers, pre-register for a procedure, learn about a treatment, sign up for a class or complete any number of tasks that brought them to your site. The more content you have, however, the harder it may be for people to find what they need. That’s because more content often means more clutter in the form of duplicate, redundant, misplaced or outdated pages.

A content inventory is a good first step in identifying potential clutter. Running an inventory and organizing it by content type (such as HTML pages, images, videos and links), gives you a look at what you have and where it’s located. Further filtering can help you take concrete action – for example, sorting by page title or filtering by subject – to identify and eliminate duplicate content. And reviewing your content by subject area can reveal gaps you may not have known about, such as a women’s section full of information about childbirth, but with limited information on other women’s health services.

Just like a clean sweep of the office, a fresh inventory of your website gives you the opportunity to clear the decks and make your relevant content more findable. Our content team thrives on conquering clutter – and we’re happy to help you. If you’re inspired to get started, contact us.

Four Ways You Can Use @robcurley’s Ideas as a Hospital Web Expert

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Eric Engelmann

Rob Curley, all-around geek and President and Executive Editor of Greenspun Interactive, the new-media division of the Las Vegas Sun had his now obligatory keynote speech at the Healthcare Internet Conference (this is his third or fourth time, I believe). As always, it was a treat: great ideas, tremendous passion for his work, and fabulous insights. And not everyone can use pornography as a punch line repeatedly in a presentation and get away with it, though maybe you can if you’re from Vegas!

But I felt like it might be worthwhile to translate some of the ideas into actionable thoughts for healthcare experts, because, well, hospitals are not newspapers. And it might be easy to draw the wrong lessons from his great presentation.

For example, you almost certainly do not need his “real time balls” visualization of site traffic (though it would impress your IT people!).

Here’s what I came away with from Rob’s presentation:

1. You need to have balls. Fight good fights and take on tough targets.

Can you imagine the pressure on the Las Vegas Sun from some of their key advertisers – the major hospitals in that area – to keep from pointing out that those same hospitals are covering up the fact that they’re killing people? Or the sensitivity of taking on the local school system when you’re writing critical stories about where your kids go to school? You can’t accuse Rob and the LVS of shying away from a fight!

Look, nobody makes a splash (or wins the industry’s most coveted awards) by being timid. You need to get things done, things that matter. Right. Now. If there’s someone in your way, it’s likely worth the risk to you to take them on.

Perhaps it’s your boss that’s in the way. Perhaps it’s a physician who doesn’t like computers (or one who thinks you need some Foursquares with your Twitters). Perhaps it’s your IT department that won’t let you have access to Facebook and you have to sneak over to the coffee shop across the street to do your social media campaign. It doesn’t matter who the obstacle is, you have to fight this, and not acquiesce or just let it flounder. Be the squeaky wheel. You should be leaving this conference with all the ammunition you need to make the case that you know what you’re doing. If you’re not, you’re not asking the right questions in the sessions. It’s there for the taking.

Marketing teams in most hospitals aren’t usually in a place to push others around. Often it’s marketing on the receiving end of everyone else’s wish lists. But why not turn the tables a bit? Take the steering wheel for a while and drive the organization forward! There are probably no other departments at your hospital at a conference talking about engaging with patients on social media or effective mobile strategies for healthcare. You are the expert at your organization. Act like it, and take the fight to the naysayers.
2. Data is not insight.

You (probably) don’t have a team of analysts to look at Google Analytics data weekly, much less with cute real-time ball diagrams. There is no lack of data out there, or analytics tools that can crunch the numbers for you. I really liked the way Rob’s team made decisions based on real data and real insights into what the data means:

Data	Insight	Action to Exploit the Insight
We get very different traffic patterns in the evening than we do during our peak period from 8-1, the types of articles that rank highly are very different.	In the evenings, our visitors are often multitasking while doing something comparatively pleasant, like watching TV, and don’t want to be reading the usual bad news.	Develop a time-of-day filtered version of the site, “Las Vegas After Dark” that focuses content on the types of content most appropriate for those visitors.
Users on different platforms look at different content.	Users on iPads and tablets are “lean backward” users and tend to be more leisurely oriented than those visiting from a standard PC/Mac.	Create appropriate form factors for mobile devices that lets users see the stories most appropriate for them.
Our articles about food get great traffic.	Eating: Everyone does it. Everyone needs to find it somewhere. Everyone has opinions it. Everyone has favorite places to do it. Or as Rob says, “Food is the new porn.”	We can feature food related content every day and guide readers to new eateries in Las Vegas.

Most hospital Web teams, though, are focused on the data side of the equation, and too often the meaning of the data gets lost in the glee of presenting numbers that “look good”. The insight part – the stuff you have to work hard to get – is the component that is necessary for you to exploit to accomplish your organization’s goals.

Your focus is not visits or traffic or eyeballs or stickiness – and neither is Rob’s. Ultimately the Las Vegas Sun wanted to make a difference with journalism in peoples’ lives – to “serve and save” their readers. It is the same for you: traffic and visits are not real measures of value, they’re just a means to an end. In your case it is likely a combination of volume growth and ultimately making people healthier. It is too easy to stray from these goals and to get focused on the data that’s easy to measure.

What’s the last true blinding flash of insight you remember from looking at your analytics software? How did it drive your strategy? You have to dig deeper, take some leaps, make some guesses, and test whether they’re right or not, in order to make big things happen.

3. Tell stories in new ways.

Even with explosive, controversial stories, Rob’s team didn’t tell them in traditional ways. For the Do No Harm series, they posted all of their source materials, generated photo and video essays, constructed elaborate visualization animations to make sense of complex data, and told patient stories in written, audio and video form.

Hospitals happen to be fountains of amazing stories – life saving heroism happens every day in every hospital! But you wouldn’t know it by looking at most hospital websites.

Certainly not every story has a dashing hero-doctor leaping onto a patient being carted down a hallway. Some stories are more mundane, like healthcare quality data. Boring stuff like MRSA infection rates. That’s not sexy, is it? It’s hard to dress that up and make it interesting.

Except that’s what the Do No Harm series is about: hospital quality! And it’s shown in a compelling way, with a point of view, that tells a great story:

There’s no reason your quality data has to be presented in a boring way, either. Show it visually, be creative. Think about the point of view you’re trying to convey and tell an exciting story!

4. Focus your time on the big stories that matter.

Unlike most newspapers, the Las Vegas Sun has been focused on committing outrageous acts of journalism. The drivel you likely see in your hometown newspaper is quite different from the exposés from Rob’s team: they’re focusing lots of energy on the really big ideas.

You have only so much time to devote to this stuff. There are shiny objects everywhere from all over the place, so you need to stay focused like a laser on the stuff that matters. You do not want to be spending your time on stupid content management system issues or fixing servers. You need to be building great things for your patients and visitors, period. Stuff that’s amazing and different. This implies you have a strong infrastructure to start from that enables you to shift your focus to higher level initiatives*.

Look, you’re going to leave this conference with a hundred ideas. But you should focus your energy on one kickass idea. When you get back to the office, put your notes about the other 99 ideas in a folder, and focus on your one priority to finish by the end of 2011. What will it be?

You’ve probably heard the Steve Jobs quote: “Look in the mirror every day and ask, ‘If today were the last day of my life would I want to be doing what I am doing today’?” – Exactly. Don’t waste time on the stupid stuff – focus on the big stories and the big ideas that matter.

* If you don’t – if you’re spending your time fighting with the basics – you should call me. As an example, you should be able to do Rob’s concept of splitting out sites specifically to improve cross-domain linking to improve Google’s rankings today, with the right partner. We’ve been doing that for several years now. You could be focused on big picture issues but perhaps you’re spending time tweaking your calendar so it works right or installing the latest patch for your CMS?

Content – Writing vs. Strategy

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Ben Dillon

Six years ago, we gave a webinar entitled “Writing for the Web” that was easily the most popular Geonetric has ever done. It was so well attended, in fact, that we held a second session!

Although the online world has changed dramatically in the past six years, getting more complex and nuanced, the concepts promoted in that webinar continue to be relevant. The world of content has certainly changed – but basics of good content remains the same.

Let’s start by getting one thing clear: Creating well-constructed content is one thing. Creating good content is much more challenging. And requires a real strategic approach.

For starters, your digital content is no longer just the text on your website. Content now resides on blogs and social media sites and often includes video, audio and images, in addition to text. A single, well-constructed piece of content is great, but ultimately, the spectrum of content you deliver should be written to work well together across all mediums. This is the role of content strategy.

Content strategy addresses the following questions:

What are we trying to accomplish?
What audiences are we reaching? What do they need from us?
What information is needed as a result?
What do we have today? How well will it serve our needs in the future?
How will we get from where we are now to where we need to be?
How will we deliver information which is both consistent and channel-appropriate?
How do we update and maintain this information over time?

Organizations — both inside and outside of healthcare — are rethinking their online operations. They’re focusing more on media production and management. Content strategy directs, coordinates and oversees an organization’s multi media empire.

Like so many changes in the evolution of the Web, this requires new skill sets and processes. For organizations that do it well, however, the ability to make content more effective for accomplishing its goals makes it all worthwhile.

To learn more about why content strategy matters and how content strategists work their magic, join us October 20, 2011 for our free webinar – More than Bullets: Creating a Content Strategy.

Inventory is a Verb

Posted on May 13, 2011 by GeoVoices

While I was at Confab this week, a colleague (in a completely earnest attempt to assist our growing strategic services team), forwarded a link to me for a website selling a tool that automates the content inventory. The timing was ironic, as the subject of automated inventories came up at the workshop I participated in. The opening quote of the website follows.

“The content inventory is the most dreaded, soul-deadening task that any Information Architect ever has to tackle…”

While I concur that it’s challenging, I would argue that this author is particularly biased for whatever reason. Some of us actually enjoy the content inventory and the creation of IA that not only works, but allows websites to be navigationally sound, user friendly and, in so doing, capitalize on any organization’s use of the Web to achieve goals.

The room of the workshop quickly distinguished itself into two groups – those who don’t find IA “soul-deadening” and those who do. Melissa Rach, a thought- and methodology development leader in our emerging discipline- had some (ahem) less than kind words to say about automating the process. It’s true, there ARE tools out there. Various members of the team at Brain Traffic have tried them all and the conclusion is this: not only should consultants offering content strategy services never automate this process, but it should always be done by someone with experience and passion for the process.

The whole point to content strategy is that you touch all the content. If you’re automating or spot-auditing, this isn’t possible. Second, these tools don’t catch everything. Finally, clients pay a lot of money to have a content strategy get into the guts of the problem, wrangle it to the ground and come up with answers. (Often, those answers pertain more to what the client needs than what they want. And these can be two very, very different things. Had you asked folks from the early 1900’s about what they wanted for better transportation, they’d have said, “faster horses.”¹)

This could lead into a larger philosophical debate about the sorry state of content everywhere, how Classical American Economic Theory brought us here and why, in the information age, this methodology for arrangement isn’t helping anyone – especially under-resourced marketing teams. But I’ll save that for another time.

I’ll round out this diatribe with my position; when undertaking a content audit in the effort toward building a content strategy, it shouldn’t be automated and it should be done by someone with experience who actually enjoys the process. Automating the content inventory would be akin to taking an aerial photo of a museum that’s been decimated by a tornado in order to take a complete inventory of the artwork that had been inside.

There is a reason, when I’m talking with a client about all of their fears and anxieties about their content, that they’re so overwhelmed. There’s a lot of it and they rarely have the time to dedicate toward not only generating, editing and publishing, but governing. We have a very big job ahead, those of us who are trying to make the Web a place that is a lot cleaner, much easier to use, and safer for everyone. This kind of work can’t be laid on an assembly line to achieve any kind of significant change or result. You roll up your sleeves and you get started. If there’s anything Ms. Rach wanted Confab attendees to take away it is this: strategy is a verb. I would add that so are all of its moving parts, including the content inventory.

¹This is Melissa Rach’s analogy.

Addressing the Online Strategy Concerns of Healthcare Leaders

Posted on May 4, 2011 by David Sturtz

Our VP and eHealth Evangelist Ben Dillon spent the last year speaking with hospital leaders across the country to learn about their online strategies. As I was reading the white paper on these conversations , I couldn’t help but notice many of the issues eHealth professionals are facing can be helped by VitalSite, our content management solution. Here’s a look at how VitalSite addresses the top themes from Ben’s discussions:

Choosing a content management system (CMS). Ben mentions the trick to selecting a CMS is balancing sophistication and capabilities with ease of use and vendor support. We recently launched VitalSite 6, but surprisingly it isn’t the third or even fourth update to our platform since VitalSite 5. We’ve deployed more than 20 value-packed, incremental releases in the last three years! We’re continually adding new capabilities, making the solution more powerful and ensuring it remains easy to use. And we aren’t stopping there. The next set of enhancements rolls out in only a couple of months.
Implementing the right functionality. Functionality is one of the best ways to build relationships with Web visitors and turn them into patients. That’s exactly why our platform offers the most valuable healthcare website functionality. From provider directories to bill payment capabilities to a very sophisticated calendar and events registration system, VitalSite has the tools needed to engage site visitors.
Rethinking Web strategy. For many eHealth professionals, developing a Web strategy is difficult because of the time it takes to figure out how to align website efforts with broader organizational goals. We built VitalSite to make it easier for you to manage your website, patient portal and intranet, so you can remain focused on developing strategy instead of building functionality.
Dealing with resource issues. According to Ben, no single issue was raised as often as the need for more aggressive investments in staff and budget. VitalSite’s workflow intrinsically allows website administrators to share the workload. In VitalSite 6, we’ve made it even easier to share website administration responsibilities, while maintaining consistency.
Improving search engine optimization. It doesn’t matter how fantastic your site is if it can’t be found. Finding new ways to improve search engine optimization is a focus of every VitalSite release. In VitalSite 6, we put important SEO controls at your fingertips, bringing key metadata to the forefront and making already friendly URLs even more search engine friendly.
Developing intuitive information architecture. No matter how flashy the design, users need to find what they want quickly or they’ll leave the site. VitalSite’s robust taxonomy system, sophisticated FlexFilter, and dynamic SmartPanels are an information architect’s dream. VitalSite 6 includes even deeper taxonomy integration, and new SmartPanels provide even more flexibility for breaking down content silos.
Understanding social media. Incorporating social media should be part of your overall marketing strategy. Using VitalSite, we can easily drive traffic to your social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook and even blogs.
Tackling patient portals. With goals to meet meaningful use and an interest in creating personalized patient experiences, many organizations are beginning to implement patient portals. One of the greatest things about VitalSite 6 is that all of our clients – from the smallest community hospital, to the most complicated integrated delivery network – have the ability to launch a patient portal that is fully-integrated with their website without the pain of migrating their existing content and functionality to a new platform. When they’re ready, we’re ready.

My daily focus at Geonetric is to ensure we offer solutions aimed squarely at the current concerns of eHealth professionals. As we launch the most advanced version of our software to date, I’m thrilled to see the close alignment we’ve achieved with the current and future needs of the industry.

Download Ben’s Candid Conversations white paper to learn more about his conversations with healthcare leaders, or visit geonetric.com to learn more about VitalSite.

Defining the Problem

Posted on April 7, 2011 by David Sturtz

“If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.” – Albert Einstein

This past weekend my two-year-old daughter uttered, for the first time, a terrifying new word: “Why?” I’m now preparing for cross-examination of my every action.

This new phase (it is “just a phase” … right?) is a great reminder to consistently stop to examine why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s easy to actively create solutions. The key is to first make sure those solutions are designed to solve a problem.

This becomes especially true as you work with your website. From the first step of selecting a content management solution all the way through to design and continual management, it’s important to stay focused on the problem you’re solving. That’s the best way to ensure a successful result.

But sometimes that’s easier said than done. So here are a few thoughts to help you stay focused.

Match solutions to needs

Only you are in a position to truly understand the needs of your organization and customers. That’s important to remember when you’re trying to select a content management system. There are thousands of solutions available. Where do you begin? What makes one system better than another? How do you determine if a solution will accomplish what you need?

Too often organizations select a generic content management solution and spend precious time reinventing the wheel. A better approach is to define the problems you’re trying to solve and select the solution that fits those needs. This will help you stay focused on developing strategies to meet your broader organizational goals without worrying about the technology.

Our VitalSite content management solution is built for the needs of healthcare organizations. It helps you easily manage your website, patient portal and intranet and includes dozens of healthcare-specific functionality to help you promote your providers, locations, events and services.

Technology built specifically for your needs helps you stay focused on solving the problems most prevalent in your organization.

Focus on your real goals

Many organizations seem to focus on the surface of their website: the visual design, content on the home page, the number of ‘hits’ the site gets. Take a page from my two-year-old and ask yourself why. Why do you want this content on the home page? Why do you want visitors on this page? Chances are you’ll quickly uncover the real place your attention should be focused: presenting a unified experience or converting visitors to patients.

With functionality like SmartPanels, FlexFilter and Taxonomy, VitalSite helps you interrelate content and cross-promote key actions across your site. And VitalSite’s Patient Portal maintains a consistent experience as consumers become increasingly engaged with your site.

And since VitalSite was designed specifically for hospitals and health systems, it inherently can handle the most complicated scenarios – helping you present a unified brand to your site visitors regardless of the number of facilities or services you’re trying to promote.

Never rest

In this industry, every day brings something new … new technologies, new solutions, new standards, new players … it’s never dull.

If you’re trying to focus on defining your problems, you can’t waste time ensuring your technology stays up-to-date. That’s why we upgrade VitalSite every 90 days. Our next version includes enhancements to nearly every module, enabling our clients to work more effectively than ever. Upgrades also routinely address new best practices in search engine optimization and social media trends.

Technology that is continually updated helps you spend more time focusing on your strategies as well.

Ask “Why?”

Even though this stage my two-year-old is going through is a bit trying, it reminds me of the importance of curiosity and investigation. Don’t just assume the solution you are using is solving anything. Get to the root of your goals and find a solution that will help you achieve them. If you’re in the market for a new content management system, ask a lot of questions.

And if you’re looking for a place to start, ask us about VitalSite. Why is VitalSite the best content management on the market? Because we built it with you and your patients in mind.

Introducing… The New VitalSite 6

Posted on March 4, 2011 by David Sturtz

When was the last time your CMS software was updated?

If you’re a Geonetric client, the answer is always within the last 90 days. In just the past year, we enhanced our patient portal; improved our calendar and events, provider, location and services modules; and added even more configurable features into the product.

But our clients ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

That’s because this March we’re introducing VitalSite 6 – an exciting, new version of our VitalSite platform!

VitalSite 6 capitalizes on all of the great releases we’ve launched over the past few years. Each release has included improvements to the technical foundation of our software. With VitalSite 6, we wrap that solid foundation together in a redesigned user interface with more powerful content management capabilities.

Intuitive design: The VitalSite 6 user interface has a new, very user-friendly look and structure. The compact layout keeps more important information above the fold and a new Action Bar locks common page actions into a consistent location. The redesigned screens also prominently display key information, such as search engine optimization properties, to remind users to add content to improve rankings. The effect is better access to the information that matters with less effort.

Powerful content management: With VitalSite 6, it takes fewer steps to create new pages and content. A completely redesigned Site Map editor gives administrators an efficient way to explore their site, locate pages and edit navigation. A new Master Layouts feature makes it easier than ever to ensure consistency among page layouts and update hundreds of pages quickly. Enhanced SmartPanels combine VitalSite’s powerful taxonomy engine with expanded configurability for improved cross-promotion and targeting of content.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg! We’re in the process of adding the final touches to the product and getting ready for our client release at the end of the month. (Did I mention all VitalSite 5 clients are able to upgrade to VitalSite 6 at no additional cost to them?)

It’s a pretty exciting time here at Geonetric – for our product development team and our clients!

If you’d like to see a sneak peek of VitalSite 6, contact us. We love showing it off.

Go Green and Save Some Green: Deploy a Board of Directors Extranet

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Ben Dillon

Paper. You have reams of paper. Each month, you turn your reams of paper into hundreds of documents and assemble those documents into heavy binders.

You ship the binders off to your board of directors. They’re carried around for awhile. And finally they’re left to sit on a shelf forever. Sound familiar? This is likely the process your hospital’s administration team undergoes for every one of your board of directors meetings. And it’s repeated over and over, meeting after meeting.

In truth, it’s probably even worse than that. The information inevitably changes. What do you do? You reprint sections of those heavy binders. Then you call couriers to deliver them to all of your board members. You may repeat this once, twice, maybe three times. Finally, you’re off the hook for a few weeks. That is until the next board meeting, when you start it all over again.

It’s a familiar process that’s costly, time consuming and inconvenient. As healthcare organizations find ways to be more efficient and environmentally conscious, printing and reprinting board books sends the wrong message. There are better answers. Why not put the whole thing on those iPads you gave board members as a holiday gift, perhaps?

Yes, the answer is to go digital. It’s a simple change in many ways. You’re already assembling huge board books using digital files, so instead of printing the information, send it digitally to board members. Large files are tricky to email and even harder to email securely. Flash drives or CDs work, but still need to be delivered to board members.

A better solution is to share the information through a secure board extranet. Board members can simply log in from anywhere and retrieve the secured documents.

Here are three reasons you should implement a board extranet:

Efficiency and cost-saving: Board extranets increase team efficiency and reduce monthly expenses. Plus you’ll use much less paper. You don’t have to spend time printing, collating, and binding your meeting documents. You’ll no longer have to pay for printing and delivery costs. It’s easier to distribute changes and updates too.
Security: Ever wonder if your board member documents truly remain confidential? When you ship and transport important documents, you never really know whose hands they may fall into. To receive information through a board extranet, board members must use a secure login and password. And once they log in, they are able to access only the information for their corresponding committees. You’ll have peace of mind knowing your documents remain secure from you to your board.
Collaboration: Board extranets provide a great vehicle to facilitate collaboration among board members, committees and taskforces. Members can upload agendas, meeting notes, educational materials, and other important information.

We’ll discuss more about the benefits of hospital board extranets as well as provide tips on how to successfully implement one in our upcoming webinar Use the Web to Create a High Performing Board of Directors on Thursday, February 17 at 2:00 p.m. CT. We’ll also showcase case studies so you can see first-hand the impressive results some of your peers have enjoyed since implementing a board extranet.

The Best Never Rest: A Year of Software Upgrades in Review

Posted on December 13, 2010 by David Sturtz

Over the past year, we’ve made some major enhancements to VitalSite, our content management solution. Using our iterative development process we release a host of new features every 90 days – and over the course of a year that adds up to a lot of new developments! Whether you’re interested in boosting patient volumes, increasing satisfaction and loyalty, promoting your services and physicians, or gaining a competitive edge in the marketplace, all of our upgrades are aimed at helping hospitals improve their websites and reach their organizational goals.

Software that engages visitors – not just patients
Turning a casual site visitor into a satisfied and loyal patient is a top priority for most healthcare marketers – and it’s one of ours too. Over the past year we’ve spent significant development time designing upgrades that help our clients engage their site visitors.

Following our design principle of gradual engagement, we’ve built a Patient Portal that allows anyone – not just patients – to begin developing an online relationship with a hospital. It requires minimal effort upfront and rewards visitors as they move further through the process, increasing adoption.

Gradual engagement is just one of the features we’ve added to our Patient Portal in 2010. We’ve also integrated the portal with our Calendar and Event Registration module, expanded the secure messaging features, and added flexible identity proofing capabilities and key health record information. Best of all, all of these features truly integrate with the website, creating one, seamless experience for the user.

Software that differentiates your organization in the marketplace
All hospitals are unique. They have different organizational structures, business environments, locations, and strategic goals. When it comes to the website, one size definitely doesn’t fit all. What may seem like a straightforward task – such as finding information about a physician – has a myriad of subtle variations from one site to the next. To meet these varying needs, we’ve upgraded many VitalSite modules that can easily be configured.

Over the past year, we’ve evolved our Calendar and Event Registration module into a full-fledged registration management system. It can now help manage the registrations for health classes, continuing education, foundation events, and all of the charity walks, runs and other special events healthcare marketers promote. In addition, we’ve improved the registration process for visitors and made some impressive enhancements to the visual design.

We’ve also enhanced our Clinical Trials directory. The directory now has more configuration options, allowing administrators to modify it based on specific needs. The integrated taxonomy and FlexFilter allows easy editing and organization into categories and manages trials across different regions, facilities and service lines. There is also a new, engaging design in the directory as well.

The next release continues on this theme. We’ll be featuring a brand new Services Directory module that integrates with our Provider Directory and Locations Directory modules. The new module takes full advantage of VitalSite’s taxonomy to help site visitors find services using alternative terms, explore related services, and browse services by configurable categories. The result is a robust browsing experience providing access to all of a hospital’s services.

Software that makes sure users will find you
Brilliant content and engaging features are useless if consumers and patients can’t find the hospital’s website. That’s why every VitalSite release in 2010 included multiple enhancements designed to enrich search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, improve the findability of content, and support detailed results analyses.

This year, we’ve introduced configurable SmartPanels allowing content to be dynamically cross-promoted. We’ve stayed ahead of the social search trend by adding features like the Facebook Like buttons to pages. We’ve improved our page load stats, which can also impact SEO efforts. We’ve added canonical URLs to every piece of content, so Google doesn’t penalize for content that may appear on multiple pages. And we’ve enhanced our sitemap.xml files to provide better detail for search spiders.

Commitment to keeping your site moving forward
As you can see, Geonetric is committed to ongoing product development. Our iterative development methodology allows us to develop software that keeps up with the rapid changes affecting our industry.

2010 was an impressive year for Geonetric, with the most upgrades in our product history. And 2011 will be no different – we’ve got some pretty amazing things planned for our Patient Portal product. We look forward to another exciting year.

Building on Success: Southern Regional Launches Impressive Intranet

Posted on July 27, 2010 by Linda Barnes

Image of Southern Regional Health System's hospital intranet

Southern Regional Health System Intranet

An intranet site can be a powerful tool to improve transparency and internal communications – but only if it’s user-friendly and highly-functional. And of course, it needs to reflect the organization’s brand and extend information already being distributed on the Internet site.

Those were the challenges presented as we kicked off an intranet project with Southern Regional Health System earlier this year.

On the plus side: 1) we’d already partnered with them to deliver a highly successful Internet site, so we were knowledgeable about their hospital’s brand and messages, 2) we’d developed great working relationships with their awesome marketing team, and 3) our VitalSite software makes it incredibly easy to distribute content ownership to many departments while maintaining control over brand standards.

The site launched last week to great internal accolades. The homepage has features that employees want at their fingertips: the cafeteria menu, a weather feed, and quick links to frequently-used content. It also highlights important organizational announcements and a message from CEO, where their top executive – brand new to the organization – can connect with employees and speak his mind on a variety of topics.

And did I mention that the design is both functional and beautiful, that the navigation is intuitive, and that the departmental sites take full advantage of VitalSite’s flexibility and functionality?

Any veteran of employee communications will tell you that one of the biggest challenges they face is cutting through the layers of the organizational structure and getting timely and accurate information distributed to all of their employees … in other words, outrunning the grapevine! Kudos to Southern Regional for their new intranet that does exactly that.

In Search Of…

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Linda Barnes

searching Robust search capability – whether from a search engine or once a visitor is on your site – is critical to the success of your site. We’re excited to announce that our current VitalSite release is packed with new and improved search functionality.

Enhancements to search engine optimization
We’re a bit picky about how our software works with Google, Bing and the like. So we’re continually refining how it renders pages for better rankings in search engines. We added several new features designed specifically to tailor content for our clients and our internal SEO experts:

Individual provider directory listings now have HTML page titles that are configurable for each doctor. The titles were automatically generated before; you can now customize them.
VitalSite manages canonical URLs for you automatically, making sure you don’t get penalized by Google for content that may appear on multiple pages.

This builds on several enhancements in our previous release (in March) that were also designed to influence Google’s ranking of content in VitalSite.

Refinements to search algorithms
Another of VitalSite’s key strengths is its search capabilities within a site. The refinements we included in this release add functionality similar to Google’s “did you mean” capability. Before you may have typed the first name “Abby” but the provider’s name was really “Abbie” or “Abigail” – now VitalSite will automatically translate for you.

This functionality works in the overall site search, plus we enabled this feature across other modules, including our Locations module and the Provider Directory module (shown here).

doctor_search2

Our clients love getting these new features and functionality automatically as part of their contract. One of our newest clients told us it’s like having Christmas in July. We told her it just continues to get better – with our quarterly releases, Christmas comes again in September!