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February 2012
Put Your Best Foot Forward
Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist
It's hard for health systems to find
blue oceans. I'm referring to blue ocean business strategies - where your
organization differentiates itself so well that competition is
irrelevant.
Healthcare organizations tend to have strong brand recognition, but weak brand
differentiation. It's difficult for patients to recognize what makes you
different from competitors, or perhaps they simply don't care. Just as often,
for a given service line, there really isn't much that actually makes an
organization truly different.
As I wrote this time
last year, "Think back to the classic definition of what marketing is -
the four P's - product, price, promotion and place. Healthcare marketers are
deeply involved in promotion, but how often do you get to direct where your
services are delivered or set what they cost? Marketers in healthcare rarely
even have the opportunity to determine what services will be delivered."
Healthcare marketers have a particularly tough job with differentiation.
Fortunately, there are areas in which you do have control:
- Campaigns,
marketing materials, employee communications
- Events
(health fairs, foundation galas)
- Website
- Social
media and other digital outreach
There is a great untapped opportunity to
differentiate organizations through the Web. Consumers' perceptions of
healthcare organizations are mostly driven by the experiences they have. Because they are
unable to assess clinical competency, their experiences craft their perceptions on
healthcare quality .
So when you do great things online (an area marketers do control), it has an
opportunity to change the patient experience (which patients value). You can
use this to differentiate your organization in the marketplace.
Hospitals are using the Web to make it easier for patients to work with them
and creating personalized, tailored experiences. When you do these things, are
you promoting them?
For example, are you promoting your convenient online appointments in TV ads,
putting your live ER wait times on billboards and getting detailed news
coverage for your patient portal? Some online capabilities are differentiators
on their own, and they should be promoted to strengthen and reinforce the brand
in the marketplace. Other times, they're a newsworthy discussion item that
allows you to communicate about something else you are doing at the
organization.
In each case, they're opportunities to do something different and that is often
a rare commodity. Healthcare organizations that are winning this game do so by
seizing these opportunities and making the most of them.
Join us for our webinar Tell
Your Story and Promote Your Online Initiatives on February 16 at 3:00 p.m.
CT to learn how your organization can more effectively promote your online
investments.
See You in Vegas!
HIMSS 2012 is fast approaching - and if you're like us, you're looking
forward to hearing the latest discussions on meaningful use, HITECH and
HIE. Geonetric will have a team at the conference - stop by booth #1370
or let us know if you'd like to schedule a time to meet
one-on-one. Please extend this invitation to anyone from your organization who may be attending.
Twitter Says: Brand Your Profile
Casey Hansen, Online Marketing Strategist
We all knew it was only a matter of time. We've spent many hours helping
clients build Facebook Fan Pages and customize them to convey a consistent
message from the main website to social media.
Now Twitter wants to get in on the fun. They recently announced the
addition of "Brand Pages" to the Twitter service. These brand pages
allow organizations to create customized Twitter profiles with logos, banners,
taglines and "promoted tweets" that remain at the top of the profile.
This could be another great way to get your message across. You can
utilize your Twitter brand page to promote a service line, upcoming event or
provide public announcements in the case of an emergency. The possibilities are
endless!
In
December, Twitter said the brand pages will be rolling out to all accounts over
the next few months.
Improving Health One Step at a Time
David Sturtz, Director of Product Strategy
I bought a
FitBit last weekend. I'm telling myself it's for professional
research purposes, and entirely unrelated to any delicious overindulgences from
December.
If you're unfamiliar, FitBit is a tiny device that clips to your belt
and tracks your movements 24/7, reporting on your activity level and sleep
quality. It's basically a souped-up, Kinect-era pedometer.
The FitBit wirelessly posts data to a website, updating regularly when
you're in range of its base station. From there, your data can be forwarded
onto Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, or - more interestingly - Microsoft's
HealthVault.
The effect is something we are striving for with our patient portal -
increasing patients' access to data about their body, health and activities.
Lab test results buried in a chart don't help patients to see the patterns in
how their body is responding to their daily choices - medication adherence,
lifestyle changes, continuing treatment - that are necessary to improve their
health.
Simultaneously, we're investigating ways to present detailed patient
data to the next generation of connected health devices, to help caregivers see
the day-to-day reality of their patients' lives.
At
the end of a day spent running from meeting to meeting and chasing after a
three-year-old, I was chagrined to see that my activity level still registered
as pretty low. However, I've now got a baseline and tomorrow I can make better
choices.
February WEBINAR
Tell Your Story and
Promote Your Online Initiatives
Thurs., Feb. 16 - 3:00 p.m.
Join us to learn how to better promote your
online initiatives with internal stakeholders, the public and the media.
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