eHealth Articles & White Papers

Clinical Trials as a Healthcare Marketing Tool

David Sturtz - Director of Product Strategy

In our recent eHealth Benchmark Survey, nearly 60 percent of respondents indicated they currently have clinical trial features on their website...or plan to add them in the next six months. Clinical trial information is detailed and often includes extremely technical content, so why are so many organizations adding trials to their consumer-oriented sites?

Here are three great reasons:

• They help improve your relationship with research physicians. It's important to maintain good relationships with your physicians. When they're conducting healthcare research, you can help them promote their studies, identify subjects, and provide interested individuals with important information. The Web is a perfect vehicle for this information.
• They help you promote your quality service lines and expand your brand awareness. Performing healthcare research demonstrates your dedication to improving medical treatments. Placing the clinical trial information on your website helps you differentiate your service lines and promotes the quality care you provide. (This becomes even more effective when you place relevant and timely clinical trial information in a SmartPanel on service line pages.)
• They help improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. The detailed, technical terminology often used in describing clinical trials is a great magnet for search engine optimization. While each trial may only attract a few hits, individuals visiting those pages are high-value visitors. Taken in aggregate, the content and visits can boost your SEO efforts.

Over the past few months, we've been working on enhancing our Clinical Trials and Requests module. We've improved the design, created more configuration options, added maps and directions to the trial location, and integrated taxonomy and FlexFilter , allowing you to edit and organize categories and manage clinical trials across different regions, facilities and service lines. All of these improvements make it easier for our clients to promote and manage their clinical trial information.

Geonetric's VitalSite 5 clients will receive this enhanced module automatically this month as part of their regularly-scheduled upgrade. Stay tuned for more details on how they're using the enhanced Clinical Trials and Requests module to improve relationships with physicians, promote their brands and increase their search engine rankings.