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Just a quick plug for the talk we’re giving next week.   Here’s the details below. 

Thirteenth National Forum on Customer Based Marketing Strategies April 6-8, 2008 Arizona Grand Resort Phoenix, AZ

Recruiting the Millennial Physician Online

The next wave of medical school graduates openly craves authenticity, connectedness, and a sense of belonging. Hear how a 99-bed community hospital has tapped into those needs by leveraging social networking, community-generated media, and search engine optimization into a cost-effective recruitment strategy for the upcoming generation.

Register today.

The last in our winter webinar series (and our most popular webinar yet): how to take your strategy to the next level.

Back By Popular Demand!! You wanted it, so we brought it back.

WHAT IS SEARCH MARKETING?
Both Search Engine Optimization – appear organically in search results – and Paid Search Management – taking out banner or text ads in search engines. Search Engine Optimization is like online PR while Paid Search is like advertising on billboards.

WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?
Part of our mission is to educate health care marketing professionals about the importance of the Internet. We find that all of our clients benefit from a clearer understanding of how Search Engine Marketing works.
Register for Tuesday, April 1st - Search Marketing Essentials

Register for Wednesday, April 2nd - Advanced Search Tactics

2pm EST | 1pm CST | Noon MST | 11am PST

 Hospitals are well known for their far reaching vision concerning quality care and innovative treatments. Why then does the average hospital website fail to live up to those promises?  Because most hospitals think of their website as an item on a to-do list. And if you’ve jumped through the hurdles enough to move a first project forward, you may find yourself wondering what to do next once the project has wrapped and the budget is spent.  In this webinar, we’ll walk you through ways to position your past success as a stepping stone to future opportunities and get your organization focuses on the next challenge ahead.

I was fascinated by this article about the challenges of healthcare content startups. No so much about why such companies exist, but in hearing about how the general market views “patients” and “consumers” and what implications that has for healthcare institutions.

After an afternoon discussing the challenges of establishing a health content startup, the final panel at EconHealth got to deals: who’s buying and who’s investing in what. ContentNext publisher Rafat Ali moderated a discussion among a group of dealmakers, from the perspective of investors, bankers and would-be buyers.

– Interest areas: Esther Dyson: “The way I divide the market is into the arms merchants and the establishment… what’s been missing: there’s been professional content and there’s user generated content, which may or may not be valuable or reliable… and then the third thing is the content about the users.” It’s the third thing that’s exciting to Dyson, who is an investor in 23andMe, the know-your-own-genes startup. “I think it’s this area that’s so exciting… Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is really, really well positioned, as is Google.” With all these things, there’s a question on whether users are aware of these new tools. Morris R. Levitt, Managing Director-Life Sciences, Desilva+Phillips, noted that the big buyers of these startups are either PE-backed platforms or major consumer media firms, like MSO. The problem: “When I listen to a lot of these specialty things, I find that a very low percentage of things are of interest to these organizations.” Most of them aren’t up to scale. Women are particularly valuable, since in many households, said Levitt: “women are the chief medical officers.”

I know many hospital CMOs who might bristle at the last conclusion, but it underscores a complete lack of thinking about providers in this conversation. Are we the only company in the US who is looking at the issue this way?

Follow the link for more above.

An article in the Boston Globe today discusses technology headed for the dustbin. I was surprised to see what fond memories I had of these objects. I’m sentimental about floppy diskettes, having spent hours as a kid installing various applications, games, and operating systems (DOS 6 was a dozen 1.44 disks, remember?). I remember the particular whir of the drive, how it sounded like a make-shift paper broom, quickly sweeping the floor. And whenever one spun for long enough, there came the faintest scent of warm, ionized plastic, as if your computer could double as an easy-bake oven.

It’s truly sentimental, I know, but increasingly people have feelings about their technology and companies are attempting to make the technology experience more tactile than cerebral.

The mainframe is long-dead; so too is the XT I built by hand its younger sister, the AT 286, and the super-fast 386 and the unbelievable 486 and so on. I think one wrinkle to Moore’s Law is that while computing speed doubles every 12-18 months, our ability to integrate it into our lives does not. The iPod has been around for nearly 10 years and finally tipped what, 3 years ago?

And that’s just consumer, personal technology. As a hospital CIO friend said, the healthcare industry is at the technology level manufacturing was in the 70’s.

In other words, floppy.

From Southwestern Vermont Medical Center CMO Blog:

This week I had an interesting conversation with my son. A college senior, he’s considering job options in his field of environmental science. Possibilities include various types of nonprofits, research, and environmental education organizations. As we talked about his ideas, and he does job interviews and gets offers, he is asking about health insurance.

Notably most organizations tell him that’s up to him. So here is the son of a physician executive, successfully launching into the workplace, with the strong prospect of not having health insurance.

As you know, I believe that we need to take a hard look at how health care is managed and funded in this country. The current system is way too complex, saddled with very high administrative costs, delivers care in uneven and illogical patterns, and leaves some 47 million Americans not covered…

read more >>

I’m convinced that all media will soon be social — that is, nearly all content we consume will be recommended to us rather than programmed at us. Stay tuned for more on that.

But I was fascinated by Facebook’s new ad system and the data I was able to find. For example, you can now target ads based on gender, location, and employment info — pretty slick for an online yearbook site.

Here’s some data I collected first hand about the demographics of who is on FB:

50 years +: 478,640
40-49 : 613,600
30-39 : 1,979,320
23-29 : 6,594,820
18-22 : 11,062,560
under 18 : 4,129,040

For those playing at home, that’s 24 million people total, with 87.5% under 30 but less than half “college-aged” — the population the site was due to serve.

Project the data 4-5 years from now, and you’ll have a population more like 50 million, with a larger chunk of 20/30’s graduates:

50 years +: 1,092,240
40-49 : 1,979,320
30-39 : 6,594,820
23-29 : 11,062,560
18-22 : 22,125,120
under 18 : 8,258,080

Estimates (obviously) 

But that’s assuming they do no aggressive advertising amongst AARP members.
So while I’m sure the general ads for skateboards, Mountain Dew, and Noxema will continue, my guess is each population will soon be getting their own targeted ads. And this is the genius of social network: the growth rate is exponential, but predictable. In 10 years, who knows — 100million? 200million?

NBC would kill for that kind of market share.

I spend a fair amount of my time tracking general Internet trends and theorizing how those trends will play out in healthcare.   And as I prepared an upcoming talk, I’m struck by how quickly the concept of a website as a destination will fundamentally change.

This blog is a great example: what started off as an experiment to see how we could influence our search ranking with little effort and zero dollars has turned into a new strategic tool to help our clients.  It seems the future of web content is considerably more fractured, customized, diffuse, and effective that the current “drive them to our homepage” model.

At MedTouch, we’re beginning to develop an online communication strategy for our own company, which includes blogs such as this but also ways of leveraging social media and search biases to our advantage.  And as we’ve run several campaign-based search marketing programs for clients, the fun and interesting challenge is putting together a cohesive, logical plan. 

I’m thinking these plans will matter more than one’s website — in fact, our next website probably won’t be a classic site at all.  It would rather be a series of blog postings, press releases, webinars we’ve given (via blip.tv), and a portfolio for visitors to sort and peruse based on their interests.  Throw in a virtual demo and I’m not sure we’d need much else.

My point is that much of this content might actually exist on other people’s websites and that fact alone would improve our search traffic, which shows the difference strategy can make.

Wall Street Journal’s Article, “GOPers Think U.S. Health Care Rocks, Dems Not So Much”

“America has the best medical care in the world,” Rudy Giuliani said last year.

Most Republicans agree with him, but most Democrats don’t, according to a new poll from the Harvard School of Public Health. The difference is striking: 68% of folks in the Grand Old Party said the U.S. has “the best health care system in the world,” compared with 32% of Democrats. Forty percent of independents said we have the best care.

I hate to split hairs, but the crux of this question involves the word “system.” Do we have the best physicians world-wide? I think so. The best technology? Again, I think we might. But does our healthcare system provide consistent, successful preventative care for all? As anyone working in healthcare would tell you, not at all. And as Cato notes, that systemic failure creates outcomes which organizations like the WHO over-weight in their rankings.

That said, I think the notion of ‘costs’ are a bit of a red herring — healthcare has its own economic forces and changes to these economic inputs and outputs would impact associated ‘costs.’ For one, fairly compensating hospitals for the cost of healthcare provided would be a start. Why? Because whenever the federal government or insurers reduce the reimbursable level for providers without regard to dollars only, they do not provide incentives for providers to innovate or increase efficiency. Instead hospitals, who often have months if not weeks to react, raise their fees on the only group they can – patients who pay out of pocket; patients without insurance.

The ‘rising costs of healthcare’ is a red herring as well. I’ve seen doomsday statistics that cite the rate of healthcare spending is growing at twice the growth rate of the U.S. GDP and by 2040, such spending would be larger than the U.S. GDP.

To which I respond: Yeah. Right.

Should anyone quote such a statistic to you, please assure them that those same statistics mean healthcare spending is only rising 3% over GDP annually. Or you might note that such figures include elective care which means patients are participating more in receiving care via discretionary income. And then suggest that a simple solution would be for the U.S. economy to grow at 6% per year as it did back in the 1990’s. (If you really want to win the argument, ask what percentage of current yearly GDP growth is attributable to the investments made in healthcare technology and life sciences over the last 20 years. Suggest greater than 50% of it.)

Ultimately, I believe the healthcare system needs to be measured on outcome, quality, and efficiency first and ‘costs’ second. As we tell our clients, if you focus on ‘costs’ you’ll the miss the results and the converse is true: if you’re focused on results, the costs seem like a minor point.

Perhaps if all Americans could participate in receiving quality healthcare that managed their entire course of treatment, with universal, electronic medical records available to every provider along the way, we would feel a lot better – both about ourselves and our healthcare system.