On January 1st I crack open Excel and plan for the year. It’s a tradition, partly to help me plan and partly to help me keep my sanity. At the beginning of the year, my husband and I decide which projects we want to tackle and how many activities to provide for our kids. Then, as I go through the year and look at our un-decorated spare bedroom or when I decide against signing my kids up for yet another activity, I can give myself a mental break because it wasn’t part of the original plan. The plan keeps us focused and reins in our scope, as a family.

As a strategy team, we take the same approach with our clients. We start off the year with a planning session and then, each quarter/month, we review and refine. With the pace of technology change today, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Our plan helps us stay on course. This doesn’t mean we don’t modify the course in response to changing business goals and technologies but, more importantly, that we have a course.

As you chart your course for 2012, I’d like to share some successful projects from our clients in 2011, and some upcoming plans for their 2012.

1. Easier, faster and better reporting. Google Analytics recently released a new interface with multiple dashboards that allows you to create comprehensive reports in a custom dashboard that displays on a single screen.  Our clients love this time saver. It can be tedious going in to pull reports for different departments, but now you can create a custom dashboard for each of them.
2. Evaluating costs. Are you paying for printed doctor directories? IASIS and MedTouch partnered to provide online Print to PDF directories to put control in the user’s hands. It is now possible for a user to receive a dynamically generated directory, based on his/her unique search query results. This allows visitors looking for a specialist, like an allergist, to print to PDF filtered results from your Find a Doctor database. The prospective patient could then look back at his list later as he/she calls to find out which local allergist is accepting new patients.
3. Physician visibility. We all know ranking at the top of search engine results is vital for hospital services, but what about your physicians? Google your top physicians’ names and you’ll probably see sites like Healthgrades.com and vitals.com, but your website’s physician profile is nowhere to be found. When prospective patients are researching your physicians, it’s important they’re seeing YOUR website with all the information necessary to become a patient. Using advanced search engine optimization and search engine marketing (SEO & SEM) techniques can dramatically improve physician visibility, not to mention physician satisfaction.
4. Navigating the social media changes. In the last year we saw YouTube change its non-profit channel design benefit for hospitals (thankfully most of our clients had this on their 2011 list and were able to get in before the change), the introduction of Google+ pages for businesses, and numerous Facebook changes.  Having a roadmap and a strategist to provide a course and direction is vital in this fast-changing world of social connectivity.
5. Ad budget management. In 2011, MedTouch continued to grow as a leader in SEM for healthcare, demonstrating the value of search engine marketing through hundreds of successful campaigns. With proper setup, you can determine which online ads and which channels provide the best results. And “results” does not mean mere clicks, it means that visitors performed the actions you desire them to, such as calling a phone number or requesting information. Unless you’re tracking conversions and diving into data, ROI is a guess. Typically, Google and Facebook generate the most traffic, but Bing may deliver more conversions at a fraction of the cost. With SEM, you have the opportunity to do A/B testing and focus your ad budget on the channel that delivers the best result, not necessarily the most clicks.
6. Mobile tools for patients. Smartphone ownership expanded to over 50% of the population this year and our clients noted a marked increase in mobile traffic to their websites. Many clients allocated a portion of their budget to creating dedicated mobile sites to serve this segment; without one, mobile user experience is typically poor. Most mobile sites included Find a Doctor, to offer patients convenient contact look-ups on the go. A couple savvy clients dove right into mobile application development in 2011, well ahead of their peers, after identifying the accelerated pace of smartphone adoption in their markets.  ER Wait Times, GPS Directions, and Wayfinding were among the mobile application tools developed for patients.
7. Content Strategy. In 2011, MedTouch engaged in many content overhauls—from small site optimizations to complex audits and architectures to thousands of pages of brand new copy. As health care consumers’ expectations and capacities evolve, your content must become more targeted, strategic and tailored. Your key audiences—patients, visitors, referring physicians, researchers, donors, etc.—expect your web content to be a clear, personalized and intuitive extension of your care mission. The results for these clients were more action-oriented and relationship-building content, blog strategies and more informed and trained teams. The biggest content killers include: a lack of content speaking to basic patient questions (ie. surgery length and recovery time), too technical content, the absence of sound and user-friendly information and a lack of ongoing governance methodologies.
8. Accurate Google Places information and map markers. Patients searching from mobile devices are presented Google Places results above organic results. Google is the first place they’ll find your hospital listed. Chances are, if they’re searching for you from their phone, they’re looking for a doctor, directions, or a phone number. You’ll want to be sure they can complete these tasks quickly or they may start looking elsewhere. Many hospitals have struggled with inaccurate Google Places information, as Google doesn’t make it easy to take control of your listing or change your locations in Google Maps.
9. Prioritize service lines in your marketing and think outside the box. You can’t always achieve the results you want by focusing on the “whole enchilada.” Optimizing your entire website or running online ads on all your service lines is both labor-intensive and costly. Test a new idea on a service line first to see what works.  You’ll provide measurable returns on your investment and gain invaluable insight into your market that you can take back and use to refine your overall online strategy down the line.
10. Finally, the ability to associate content dynamically on your website. You can now display patient testimonials or related health news on a condition page by tagging the content within a content management system (CMS). Take the grunt work out of maintaining your website next year by making strategic enhancements in how you store and release new content through your CMS. Talk to your in-house or partner CMS providers on how to upgrade.  Your webmaster or marketing go-to on the front lines will love you for it.

I’m excited about 2012, the strategic roadmap kickoffs and the opportunity to work with our amazing existing clients and the MedTouch strategy team. Have a project in mind for us? We would be happy to hear from you!

Happy New Year