A new year is upon us, providing a great opportunity to take note of the big shifts in healthcare, digital marketing, and (most importantly) where they intersect! Here are the big themes that we see for 2017:
Ensuring your organization’s website is easy-to-navigate and intuitive are top priorities for healthcare marketers today.
But it’s important to consider that optimal website usability can look and sound very different to people with sensory impairments like blindness, low vision, deafness or hard of hearing. People with cognitive disabilities, or whose native language isn’t English, can struggle with content comprehension. It can also be more difficult to navigate a website with certain motor skill impairments.
For people with a range of abilities different from your own, you must take usability a step further and address accessibility.
You’re not investing in digital marketing just because it’s fun – you’re investing in it because you know it can help you win new patients.
But if you want to win, you need to know where you stand. How do you compare with other healthcare organizations like yours? Are your results competitive? Do you have the team, partners and budget that you need in order to succeed?
If you don’t know where you stand, you’re in luck! We’re proud to announce that Geonetric has partnered with eHealthcare Strategy & Trends magazine to once again conduct the most comprehensive survey on digital marketing in the healthcare industry.
The 2016 Digital Marketing Trends in Healthcare survey is officially open – and we want thought leaders like you to participate!
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A lawsuit filed in California on March 15 accuses Facebook, along with a number of high profile healthcare systems and websites, of violating HIPAA and users’ privacy. Initially, this seemed ridiculous, but on reviewing the complaint, there are some interesting and unexpected conclusions to be found.
It turns out when you put Facebook’s “Like” button on a page on your website, it acts like an analytics tracking code – communicating information about the page you’re visiting to Facebook. This information is not just available to Facebook when you click that “Like” button, but as soon as it’s loaded on the page! Facebook is able to connect this information with your profile through a variety of mechanisms and uses it to profile you into some of its 154 health-related segments.
There are a few things the Plaintiffs see wrong with this arrangement.
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What’s the biggest security hole facing your hospital? It’s your outdated version of Internet Explorer!
Microsoft used to support “old” browser versions for years after new versions were released. But now their model is changing, largely in response to competing browsers that automatically update and stay current over time.
The provider directory is one of the most challenging parts of any health system website and easily the one most likely to run you afoul of organizational politics. Everyone has an opinion and, more importantly, many doctors have an opinion. And doctors’ opinions tend to be a little louder than everyone else’s!
That said, I spend lots of time researching and testing provider directories and I’ve noticed two things that the most successful ones tend to have in common.
We’ve started down a path to radically change the way we build software at Geonetric. The journey started, as these things so often do, with an innocent conversation.
The conversation explored how we can get valuable new software capabilities into clients’ hands more quickly. Our primary software platform, VitalSite, is a fairly traditional web application. Each instance of the software is installed on a server at our data center or, in a few cases, in our clients’ data centers.
For Valentine’s day this year, my wife got us his and hers Jawbone UP fitness trackers. But being the technology rebel that I am, I carry a Windows Phone. Unfortunately the Jawbone lacks any app support for my platform of choice.
And so I found myself (after writing just a few short months ago that 2015 was definitely NOT the year that wearables were going to change everything) researching everything that I could find on wearables in order to pick just the right fitness tracker for me.
We talk quite a lot at Geonetric about organizational agility – the ability to experiment, change and adapt quickly. Agility is a key strength for corporations today, particularly for those in rapidly changing markets. And when it comes to changing industries, few are going through the level of upheaval that healthcare is experiencing today!
Last week at the Geonetric 2015 eHealth Symposium we empowered our clients to be more agile with the Beta release of Geonetric’s Form Builder. Form Builder does exactly what it says – it helps administrators create online forms that they can attach to their websites, blogs and intranets.
Nearly every meeting I’ve had with our clients’ executive teams in the past year has included the phrase “pricing transparency.” Everyone sees it coming but, but very few really know how to move forward.
It was with this in mind that I attended David Marlowe’s Healthcare Marketing and Physician Strategies Summit session on pricing transparency.
Marlowe reiterated that like so many trends in healthcare, our customers are driving us forward and healthcare organizations are fighting to catch up. Consider these stats:
As a Product Owner (PO), I work hard to ensure that VitalSite is the best content management system on the market. Prioritizing which features and enhancements make it into the product each release requires thoughtful decision making – you have to give needed attention to shifts in the healthcare market, technology advancements and of course the feedback of clients.
It’s fun to talk about the big, sexy stuff the team accomplishes: new modules, major new features and strategic integrations.
The reality is that we have a wide range of requests coming from many different stakeholders and sometimes it’s the little things that make clients (and coworkers!) really happy.
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Your website is one of the most important marketing tools for delivering new patients to your hospital. It helps you promote your services, share patient stories, and highlight what makes you different than the competitor down the road. But most importantly, your website gives you the opportunity to directly convert visitors into patients. And it gives you access to the metrics that tell where you’re most successful.
As the old adage says, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Google Analytics (GA) gives you lots of data and ways to evaluate usage patterns and user trends on your website. So much data, in fact, that it can be overwhelming. But if you have a sophisticated content management system and you’re just using GA “out of the box,” you’re missing important parts of the online experience.
I’m a big fan of all of those “forecasting the future of…” blog posts that we see in January. I just can’t get enough. While many recommendations are pragmatic, it’s easy for prognosticators to throw out a few Hail Mary’s in the hope that if something truly unexpected happens, they can claim to have predicted it.
At the risk of sounding Scrooge-y, here’s my list of unpredictions – themes that I’m seeing on a lot of lists in healthcare, marketing and digital that simply aren’t going to happen… at least not in 2015.
