Archive for the ‘Digital Healthcare’ Category

Hospital Websites: Beauty is in the Eye of the User

In April, we featured a blog post entitled What Do Consumers Want from a Health Plan Website?, which encouraged health plan companies to tailor their sites to consumer needs. But hospitals and clinics should also ensure that their sites don’t leave a user feeling confused and frustrated.

Hospitals face a complex balancing act. On one hand, visitors to a hospital website want to accomplish many tasks, including finding a doctor, getting directions, making an appointment and evaluating the hospital. But they also want clear and concise pages that are user-friendly. In the information age, in which 140 character tweets and text messages rule the air, people want a multitude of information in quick spurts.

The problem is that hospital stakeholders may not even realize that there’s a problem! It becomes automatic for them to click through a series of links or deal with a messy homepage. The best strategy for an employee wishing to revamp the site is to sit down and pretend to be a prospective patient. Picture yourself as a mom whose kid has a weird-looking rash or someone with an emergency.

Once you have taken on a persona, look at your site with their eyes, and focus on four main questions: Continue reading »

iPad Apps: Cutting-Edge Sales Tools for Superior Products

Before joining the account team at HCB Health, I spent a number of years as a medical sales field rep. One job specifically required me to sell $275k+ pieces of capital equipment to surgeons. At the time, my only sales tools were paper-based brochures and my winning attitude. While I found success by forming positive surgeon relationships, I often wondered if superior sales tools would make me a more successful salesperson?

Today, developing those superior sales tools is a hefty part of my job at HCB Health. I make it a goal to lead the pack in terms of how our clients market to surgeons. For many of our clients, those superior tools are iPad-based.

iPad apps can be a unique, creative and efficient way to sell your product. The best of these are tailored to a client’s products, goals and sales rep needs. Below are a few different approaches we’ve taken to best accommodate various medical equipment products and sales: Continue reading »

Vote for Tweet This – Your Healthcare Brand Can Be Social

SXSW is just seven months away, and if some of our healthcare friends in the know are correct, the 2012 version of SXSW will be even bigger and better for #HCMKTG and #HCSM professionals. We can’t wait, and we have a few ideas already in motion.

Our dual presentation submission this year is from yours truly and Dave Gannon, one of our client partners. We plan to share a path that attendees can use to start and present a plan for their own company. From our panel description: Continue reading »

The Rise of the EMR

In our modern wired world, more and more personal information is becoming digitized. Though late to the game, the healthcare arena is joining the trend.

Meet the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) — an application for storing and accessing patient data online. Also known as an Electronic Health Record (EHR), it has the capacity to document every injury and ailment a patient has suffered since his or her birth. It can help physicians anticipate adverse reactions, eliminate duplicate services and ultimately help the industry more effectively perform its primary function: saving lives.

The Future of Healthcare

A recent MedPartners article touched on an increase in EMR adoption brought on by the recent healthcare reforms: Continue reading »

Advergames – The Next Step for Healthcare Marketing?

In a world where as many as 5,000 advertisements are seen daily, many marketers have been finding new ways to reach consumers that aren’t intrusive or bothersome, but are still impactful. We’ve already seen this done with product placement in TV shows and in movies, and it looks like the next area to explore is video games. Advergames, as they are called, are online/offline video games in which brands and products are interwoven into the game. The advantage of an advergame over product placement is that users often actually interact with the product in the game.

Why Create an Advergame?

1. Increase brand awareness – If the game is enjoyable and playable you’ll be able to get higher engagement rates, and with that comes higher brand recall.
2. Target specific brand demographics – Advergames allow the advertiser to create relevant games for their target audiences.
3. Measurable – Able to see who’s playing the game, when they‘re playing it, where they’re playing it and for how long. This gives you more data-driven insights about your target audience than ever before.
4. Increase ROI with lower risk – Advergames are a more cost effective way to create an engaging and measurable experience with consumers rather than many traditional media tactics.

Continue reading »

The “Gamification” of Healthcare

With the diminishing mind share of traditional media among consumers, advertisers are constantly seeking new and innovative ways to reach them with their message. So where have all the consumers gone? How are they spending their free time? The answer might surprise you.

Interactive games keep people fit through healthy competition.

An estimated 72% of all Americans play video games

Today, gaming has surpassed Hollywood as the largest entertainment industry in the world. This meteoric rise in online and console-based video game popularity has become the new Promised Land among marketers.

The trick, it seems, is to create an engaging game that educates while it entertains. Instead of defeating aliens or rescuing the princess, players spend countless hours working toward intangible goals dictated by marketers. This process is known in the industry as “gamification.” Continue reading »

Does This Look Infected? Self-Diagnosis for iPhone and iPad

Smartphones and tablets are fast becoming our go-to utilities for the many needs of modern life. ePatient activities are now joining eCommerce, banking, location-based services and entertainment as common smartphone and tablet applications. Let’s look at some of the leading self-diagnosis apps for the iPhone- or iPad-enabled ePatient.

iTriage – Free

iTriage was created by emergency room physicians to help people figure out what they might have and where they might be able to go to treat it. While I’m sure it is the bane of many an actual physician, it’s perfect for the curious hypochondriac. With iTriage, you can check symptoms, look up diseases and procedures, track all of your medical info and even look for physicians close to your current location. Continue reading »

More Ways to Reach Physicians Online

Doctors dig digital. In a recent article published by the New York Times entitled The Rise of Desktop Medicine, Dr. Pauline W. Chen says she and fellow colleagues are finding themselves in front of their computers more than at their patient’s bedside.

Computers offer what a doctor’s “clinical acumen” may not — syntheses of clinical findings and measurements, complex statistical models and risk factor calculations. According to Dr. Chen, using these tools to help treat patients has taken healthcare from traditional, bedside medicine to desktop medicine.

HCB Health’s own Anne Pratt recently told us of the current mobile boom and its expected growth in coming years. Just as they do desktop medicine, physicians rely on smartphones to help care for their patients, with an estimated 81% of physicians using smartphones in their clinical lives. Continue reading »