GeoVoices

In Search Of…

July 8, 2010 – 12:36 pm

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!

Authored By Linda Barnes Vice President, Business Development Posted in Category(s): Content Management (CMS), VitalSite Tagged: Content Management (CMS), SEO/SEM, VitalSite Comments (1)

Get Ready for Social Search

Authored by David Sturtz

July 8, 2010 – 12:20 pm

Where did you begin the last time you looked for a new primary care physician (or a specialist to cure your unsettling, Internet-diagnosed affliction)?

Turning to friends, family, and acquaintances for their recommendations is a common solution. Whether you’re seeking a good restaurant, hotel, or hospital bed, the people in your social network are a key source of information.

Launch a browser or mobile app today, and you will rapidly encounter dozens of consumers actively sharing brand experiences that range from generally positive (search for replies to @zappos) to overwhelmingly negative (@bpglobalpr). The wide adoption of social platforms, and the exploding interest in social media marketing, has made it important to participate in the conversations, but to what end?

Enter a new, more passive form of connecting social networks and brands.
Search platforms, like Google, have begun to integrate results culled from the searcher’s social networks. Meanwhile, social platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, are turning to search as way of deriving further value from their data.

Facebook, in particular, appears to be challenging Google’s search dominance. When a user searches on Facebook, items “liked” by their friends are displayed as highly relevant results, essentially creating a socially-aware version of Google’s PageRank algorithm.

These new layers describing personal relationships sit on top of the existing data about page content and the digital linkages among sites. They serve as a new lens for focusing search results, revealing new possibilities for determining relevance. Staying relevant in this changing sea of data requires a continual effort.

It remains to be seen if Facebook can become a major player among search engines, and where Google’s next step into the social Web will land. However, we are headed into a new era in search, where findability relies not solely on content, but also on social context.

Authored By David Sturtz Product Manager Posted in Category(s): Social Media Tagged: SEO/SEM, Social Media Strategy Comments (2)

A Social Path to Community Support

Authored by Ben Dillon

July 8, 2010 – 12:15 pm

Social media is about more than being social, it’s about building a community, and often around areas of related interest.When it’s your real-world community you’re trying to engage, social media provides an excellent set of tools.

I recently had the privilege of participating in a discussion panel with Mike McCamon, chief community officer for Water.org, a non-profit organization that provides safe drinking water in third world countries. When Mike talks about engaging his communities, he groups his goals into three areas: friendraising, fundraising, and fussraising. I look at these concepts in the following way:

Friendraising: Friendraising is most often used to mean fundraising based on personal relationships. In a social media world, however, it’s about building a social community, engaging them, and motivating them to support your cause. To do this, you need to be interesting, passionate and genuine. Unlike the interruptive communications model used in TV or radio, social media members choose to listen to you.

Fundraising: Your organization probably has a foundation that raises funds to support the organization. Social networks play a growing role in fundraising … as a method to send an appeal to your supporters and as a method for them to share that appeal to their networks, effortlessly.

Fussraising: In addition to monetary support, there are many ways you can give to organizations (and use your network to do so). Ask your network to spend time learning about your issues. Ask them to use their reputation by visibly supporting your organization online and offline. Motivate them to evangelize for your cause and write letters of support.

Certainly, your organization needs financial donations to build new buildings and offset the costs of charitable care, but it is often other forms of support that prove to be critical. For example, when you are adding additional inpatient capacity, your organization may need to go through a certificate of need application process requiring clear evidence of community support. Your job is to reach out to people in your community, inform them about your challenge, excite them about the opportunity, motivate them to write letters of support, and share the message with other community members.

For classically trained marketers, using social media to build community support is a challenge that requires new skills and a new outlook. Amongst these challenges is the need to build a network of followers up front. Unlike communications via TV commercials, where you use the station’s network, social media requires you to build your own network. It takes time, but the payoff is rewarding, because your network is interested in what you have to say. When you begin from this point, you have a far better chance of success.

Join us for our July webinar “Use the Web to Build Community Support” as we explore how to use websites, social media, and other online tools to generate enthusiasm about a new project.

Authored By Ben Dillon Vice President & eHealth Evangelist Posted in Category(s): Uncategorized Tagged: Best Practices, Fundraising, Geonetric Webinars, Social Media, Social Media Strategy Comments (1)

Happy #SMDAY Everyone!

Authored by Ben Dillon

June 30, 2010 – 9:52 am

As our real-world social networks have transitioned online, we’re now taking our online social networks and trying to meet more of those people in the real-world. No, I’m not talking about some new Windows Mobile commercial. I’m talking about Social Media Day!

It’s a day to celebrate “the revolution of media becoming social.” And how do we do that? By actually getting together with other other people. It’s novel, I know.

Here are the details from Mashable, who created the event and a message from Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore:

So get out on all of your favorite social media channels and wish your friends/followers/tweeps a happy #SMDAY!

Authored By Ben Dillon Vice President & eHealth Evangelist Posted in Category(s): Social Media, Uncategorized Tagged: #SMDAY, Mashable, Social Media Day Comments (1)

How Regulation Hurts Innovation

Authored by Ben Dillon

June 14, 2010 – 3:00 am

How Regulation Hurts Innovation Have you ever wondered why it takes years for a new healthcare innovation to make it into practice? A rational person might think this will improve due to health reform. But unfortunately we don’t live in a rational world, and some healthcare innovators are concerned that innovation will be harmed by reform rather than improved.

Take a few minutes to watch Josh Makower of ExploraMed talk on the subject as part of Stanford University’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership Series.

Authored By Ben Dillon Vice President & eHealth Evangelist Posted in Category(s): Uncategorized Tagged: Healthcare Innovation, Healthcare Reform, Josh Makower of ExploraMed, Thoughts on Healthcare Reform Comments (0)

How Do Corporate Websites and Social Media Outcroppings Fit Together?

Authored by Ben Dillon

June 11, 2010 – 3:15 am

You may recall a post from last year discussing the supposed death of the corporate website. It was my reaction to a number of posts claiming the age of the destination website had passed and social media was the heir to that platform. Perhaps the best known in that group was (then) Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang’s post about the irrelevant corporate website.

While not backing down on his previous position, Owyang recently presented thoughts on how to make your corporate website relevant by incorporating social media. Like nearly everything Owyang writes, it’s well worth a read.

How are you integrating the social graph into your hospital website? We know hundreds of hospitals are making use of social media tools, such as Facebook and Twitter. Have you seen any that add more than just the link to their sites – that really integrate social media into the online experience?

I also point you to the recent Geonetric white paper on patient-centric communications for thoughts about how the destination website, social media and patient-portal solutions fit together for healthcare organizations.

Authored By Ben Dillon Vice President & eHealth Evangelist Posted in Category(s): Uncategorized Tagged: Ed Bennett, Jeremiah Owyang, Social Media, Social Media Strategy Comments (1)

Engaging Site Visitors is a Long-Standing Quest

Authored by Ben Dillon

June 9, 2010 – 8:33 am

Engaging Site Visitors is a Long-Standing Quest - Predicted Top 25 Site Features 2010 Hospitals and health systems are continually looking for ways to make their websites more engaging. I’ve been talking with Web managers over the past few months through our Ask Ben consultations and the goal of creating a more engaging site is the most recurrent theme. Why?

Online consumers have always been fickle, but their attention span is shrinking. According to an annual report into Web habits by Jakob Nielsen, “users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave.” The time they spend on sites is decreasing, and bounce rates (the percent of site visitors who depart after viewing a single page) are increasing.

Organizations want more than just a “click by” visit. So, they are continually trying engage online visitors and provide the information they seek. In fact, many organizations measure the success of their website in terms of visitor engagement.

But according to analytics guru Avinash Kaushik, measuring engagement is a long-standing quest on the Web. He says that’s because “it is not really a metric, it is an excuse…an excuse for an unwillingness to sit down and identify why a site exists.”

In other words, organizations are trying to use their websites to generate value in a way that’s both meaningful and measurable. But they’re doing this without a strategy and a clear definition of how to connect with visitors.

There are many ways you can engage consumers on your site. The most effective way is to add functionality that allows consumers to complete tasks. If consumers have to leave the website to engage with the organization – for example, place a phone call to schedule an appointment or pay a bill – they will. And this will make it even more difficult to measure the success of the website.

Engaging Site Visitors is a Long-Standing Quest Top 25 Up and Comers Site Features 2010 Earlier this year, we conducted a survey to measure the functionality hospitals currently have on their site and plan to add to their sites. Most sites have the traditional capabilities that offer information about the organization (i.e., maps, doctors, locations, jobs, classes). (Figure 1) However, much of the “up and coming” features (Figure 2) focus on functionality that engages visitors. Healthcare sites are adding more self-service options to help consumers complete transactions (i.e., donations, bill pay, credit card processing) or interact with the organization (i.e., portal technology, secure messaging, prescription refills).

The leap from nebulous engagement to far more concrete value comes down to having site functionality.

Obviously, there’s a big difference between functionality that’s implemented well and functionality that doesn’t connect with visitors. Make sure to attend our upcoming webinar, Add Functionality that Delivers. We’ll be examining popular hospital website functionality – such as calendar and events, appointment scheduling and online bill pay – and explore ways to utilize these features to engage your site visitors.

Authored By Ben Dillon Vice President & eHealth Evangelist Posted in Category(s): Uncategorized Tagged: Ask Ben, eHealth Industry Survey, eHealth Insights, Geonetric Webinars, Website Functionality Comments (0)

Smart Becomes Smarter

Authored by Eric Engelmann

June 9, 2010 – 7:54 am

We’re excited to announce that our next release, VitalSite 5.2.7 is finishing final testing, and includes 48 new features and improvements. Each quarterly release is packed with items big and small, and is part of our way to keep clients at the forefront of eHealth. Most of the new capabilities were requested by our clients, and range from minor enhancements to big new ideas.

One of my favorite new features builds on one of our core technologies: SmartPanels.

SmartPanels gives you the ability to automatically show links to related content as you browse the site. It’s important that it be automatic, because managing all of those links manually across thousands of content pages would be extremely time consuming.

Asante Health System has a good example of a SmartPanel on their cancer service line page at Rogue Valley Medical Center.

But in this latest release, we’ve taken this several steps further, allowing clients to deploy much more advanced panels that previously required technical work. For example, on a page about the cancer services at the Cedarview Clinic, we can create panels that:

Show doctors that are employed at Cedarview and specialize in oncology
Show only featured doctors that practice at Cedarview and specialize in oncology
Show a randomly ordered list of oncologists from the entire directory
Show all doctors that practice at the Cedarview Cancer Center location, regardless of specialty
Show the doctors with specialties that match the settings for the section you’re in, override it with custom settings, or mix the two – which has big implications for larger organizations with complex political hierarchies and numerous facilities.
Show the doctors at a location that accept a particular health insurance plan, speak a particular language, or are otherwise filtered in variable ways

The new features allow configuration of how many doctors should be displayed, and visual styles on a field-by-field basis for each individual panel. It works for classes & events, locations, and other panels too.

The hat trick in this release is that all of that can be done automatically by VitalSite, based on the page you’re looking at – you don’t have to set each one up manually or worry about any programming.

And the other 47 new features in this release? We’ll highlight a few of those in subsequent posts.

Authored By Eric Engelmann President & CEO Posted in Category(s): Uncategorized Tagged: Asante Health System, Geonetric News, Q2 2010 VitalSite Release Notes, SmartPanels, VitalSite, VitalSite Release Comments (1)

Facebook Has a Hard Time Growing Up

Authored by Ben Dillon

June 1, 2010 – 6:56 am

The media’s been overwhelmed with handwringing over Facebook’s privacy changes, but I think this is simply a symptom of a larger problem. Zuckerberg and company are having a hard time figuring out what Facebook is going to be when it grows up. Sure, the firm brought in between $600 and 700 million in revenue in 2009. But at less than $2 per user, it falls far short of long term expectations for the company.

So the company that has grown to over 400 million active users (keep in mind that’s a lot larger than the total U.S. population) using a “play amongst yourselves” mentality needs to find itself a business model. There have been a set of changes over the past several months that seem to show a deliberate, if somewhat clumsy, approach to monetizing this user base more effectively.

Apps can’t nag – As part of a series of platform changes in December 2009, Facebook cut back dramatically on the number of ways that applications could harass users’ network of friends. While we’re all grateful for this shift, it’s led to significant reductions in the number of players of popular Facebook games as the normal churn of users isn’t replaced through viral advertising.
Impact: App developers need to invest more aggressively in Facebook advertising to keep those player numbers up.
Facebook credits – Facebook has its own currency, Facebook Credits. It’s a payment platform akin to Paypal through which app developers can accept payment in credits for premium options in their products. The trouble is that Facebook takes a 30% cut of those transactions, so most developers have opted to use PayPal instead. This was central in the recent spat between Facebook and top Facebook game developer Zynga.
Impact: Facebook is strong-arming app developers to use their virtual currency because the app developers are making more money through Facebook than Facebook itself. The reality is that they’re having some success. For better or worse, expect this to be a big part of the payment mix in the future.
Dropping the walls on privacy – Facebook changed the way that it secured things within its network, effectively opening lots of information that was previously only available within individuals’ networks to the world at large. Zuckerberg has admitted that they made mistakes with the complexity of the privacy changes and has announced a simpler set of privacy controls, but his assertion that public information is the default seems to be the guiding philosophy.
Impact: Philosophy aside, I see this as a competitive move as Facebook attempts to counter the growing popularity of Twitter which it perceives as a threat to its dominance.

Like anything that’s gotten popular with a price tag of free and no strings attached, Facebook is going to get some pushback when it attempts to look after its own interests. Still, some of these moves feel particularly clumsy. For a platform that seems to stumble into successes almost accidentally, coming up with a well reasoned plan for profitability is a tough task, made all the tougher by a monstrous corporate ego and what’s evolving as a strong-arming, dictatorial style.

Facebook still hasn’t found the answer to this question of profitability, so expect more snafu’s as they continue to find their way.

Resources:
If you’re wondering how private your Facebook information is, have a look at http://www.rabidgremlin.com/fbprivacy/

Not sure how to adjust your FB security, have a look at http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/How-to-Control-Your-Facebook-Privacy-Settings-225062/

Authored By Ben Dillon Vice President & eHealth Evangelist Posted in Category(s): Uncategorized Tagged: Facebook Comments (1)

Hesitant about building a patient portal? Think about it like this…

Authored by Heather Stanley

May 25, 2010 – 8:38 am

Hesitant about building a patient portal? Think about it like this… There’s no question patient portals are a hot topic right now. Not only are patients demanding more interaction with their healthcare providers, recent reform changes have left many organizations considering moving down the portal path sooner than expected.

What’s the biggest obstacle they face? It’s overwhelming. And expensive.

Or at least that’s the perception.

This is the topic Geonetric’s Ben Dillon presents in a recent Ask the Expert column for eHealth Strategy & Trends. Ben tackles the question “How Do I Start a Patient Portal without Breaking the Bank?” and discusses the benefits of creating a portal that isn’t tied to back-end systems as a first step for many organizations. Ben interviews industry thought leaders, including Private Health News’s Dan Ansel and TransforMed’s Terry McGeeny, and showcases Geonetric’s portal work at Genesis Health System.

If you haven’t yet, check out the article and learn more about the different ways organizations are approaching portal initiatives.

Authored By Heather Stanley Marketing Communications Manager Posted in Category(s): Uncategorized Tagged: Ben Dillon, Dan Ansel, eHealthcare Strategy & Trends, Genesis Health System, Private Health News, Terry McGeeny, TransforMED Comments (1)

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In Search Of…

How Regulation Hurts Innovation

Engaging Site Visitors is a Long-Standing Quest

Smart Becomes Smarter

Facebook Has a Hard Time Growing Up

Hesitant about building a patient portal? Think about it like this…