2008 eHealth Articles
Social Media and Its Impact on Brand
Your brand emerges not only from your various marketing touch points with health consumers, but also from their impressions and experiences, the experiences others share with them, and media coverage.
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Patient Portals: Adding the Personal Touch to Healthcare
A patient portal should allow patients to actively monitor their health and the health of their families. Some software companies refer to patient portals as a public website...but here at Geonetric, they are much more. Patient portals should carry quite a bit of functionality with the goal of benefiting patients by making their interactions with your organization easier and more personal.
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A New Look at the eHealth Industry
We're deep into the analysis of the data from our 4th Annual Survey on Initiatives in eHealth and we found many familiar themes. The results showed that the importance of the Web among hospitals and health systems is still high, investment and staffing remain strong and there is an incredible amount of new development work underway. In other words, the eHealth industry is moving in the right direction.
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Making the Case for Web Analytics
Web analytics are highly subjective. Any values that you measure are driven by elements of site design, methods of collection and finely-tuned definitions of abstract metric concepts. If you analyze your site with two different analytic tools, for example one log-based and one javascript-based, you'll likely find the results bare only a vague resemblance to one another. So, why bother with metrics?
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What is Service Line Marketing?
Service line marketing receives a lot of attention, yet there is no clear consensus on the definition of service line marketing, how to evaluate this approach for your marketing efforts, and how this fits together with your other marketing priorities.
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Using the Web to Promote your Service Line Capabilities
Hospitals and health systems are increasingly embracing a service line approach for organizing and marketing care. The next step is to understand how to best utilize eCommunications, such as the hospital's website or eNewsletters, as part of the service line marketing process.
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Implementing a Policies and Procedures Management System
Geonetric's new electronic Policy and Procedure Manager makes it easy for hospitals and health systems to organize and update policy and procedure documents. When implementing the software, there is always the challenge of how to get started-you need to create a plan, clean-up existing policies and modify your processes.
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Don't Wait for a Crisis to Review your Crisis Communication Plan
As you've probably heard, June 2008 was a trying month in Iowa, weather-wise. After starting with the first F5 tornado that we've seen in decades, we closed the month with unprecedented flooding, now being described as one of the 10 worst natural disasters in U.S. history. Such occasions remind us to revisit the plans and preparations that we've made in case a crisis impacts our organization.
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Ensure Adoption of Your Hospital's Web Site with a Supportive Web Culture
By including key stakeholders, you create a Web culture that is more likely to adopt your online initiatives. If the stakeholders are involved in the development of the site or features and understand the value, they are more likely to support the roll out of the features and use them. If they are not involved, adoption can be difficult.
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Web Governance: How to Create a Dream Team for Your Website
So you've decided to bite the bullet and create a Web governance committee. Where do you start? How do you make sure the team works together successfully to improve your results rather than becoming a bottleneck that slows down your Web initiatives?
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Tips for Connecting with Seniors Online
Seniors represent a diverse audience with varied needs. Their physical capabilities, interests, and information needs vary across the senior age spectrum as well as by income, education and psychographic profile. You can make your website better align with the different ways seniors use the Web and the types of information they seek by making a few simple changes.
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Bridging the Divide Between Marketing and IT
If you are in charge of your hospital's website and it stops functioning properly, you must answer to key stakeholders, both inside and outside of your organization, who want to know what went wrong and what steps are being taken to fix the situation. Unfortunately, the department responsible for answering the tough questions can sometimes be different from the department that has the answers. How do you ensure your site receives the appropriate level of attention in the event of a disaster or security breach?
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Prevent, Prepare & Practice: Three Ps of IT Disaster Recovery
As you plan for a disaster, it is important to realize you are protecting your organization from the effects of the disaster - power outages, security breaches and virus outbreaks - not the disaster itself. You will never be able to foresee the disaster-that's why prediction is not one of the three P's. However, you can avert most known failures from happening.
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Are Microsites Right for Your Organization?
It's often difficult to determine if the issue at hand is really one of microsites or if it relates the overall approach that your organization is taking when determining how to split up its websites. It can be difficult to determine when to use a single site or multi-site strategy and how the use of microsites fits into the approach you select.
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Microsites and the Zen of SEO
Marketers tend to use microsites because they are highly targeted and perceived to be search engine friendly. But, do microsites really aid in search engine optimization (SEO)? Using microsites can be a controversial move. There are equally vocal pundits who support and attack microsites and their relationship to SEO.
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