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An article from the Neshco newsletter, about engaging patients online.

Here’s a crazy idea: next quarter, when you take a new service line to market, update your homepage. Put the service line front and center and, much to the chagrin of the Director of the Wound Care “Center of Excellence” and the doctors who wield the latest CyberUtensils set, you will see traffic to the service line jump at least 20%.

Want to bump it to 30%? Update the content on that service line’s landing page, tying it back to the exact language in the offline campaign and resubmit to Google.

It’s classic marketing 101, but the average hospital website is so focused on representing the institutional identity, it has little relationship with offline marketing efforts. I’ve heard plenty of excuses for this ranging from the political – we’d have to get the CIO involved, to the technical – our website software is so lousy, no one uses it, to the sublime – we might get more admissions than we could handle for that program. Heaven forbid!

None of these excuses matter to patients, who struggle to make a health care decision in a marketing landscape full of noise and who are increasingly lured by genuinely helpful websites, such as RevolutionHealth.com, with advertising budgets that begin to approach your institution’s payroll. These social healthcare sites have quintupled in the last year – from five to thirty-one at last count – and they are all seeking to monetize patient choice, driving your marketing costs up, up, up…

Read more about how to engage patients online.

Here’s a no-brainer from the Atlantic: dingy hospitals rooms have a negative impact on patient care.

Over the past decade, most public places have gotten noticeably better looking. We’ve gone from a world in which Starbucks set a cutting-edge standard for mass-market design to a world in which Starbucks establishes the bare minimum. If your establishment can’t come up with an original look, customers expect at least some sleek wood fixtures, nicely upholstered chairs, and faux–Murano glass pendant lights.

I was just listening to a web video promo about the Amazon.com Kindle where said author (Michael Lewis) talked about how great it was to pass the hour long wait with his new digital reader.  Because, you know, the magazines are 6 months-old Sports Illustrateds.

“Except for the computers you see, it’s like a 1980s hospital,” says Jain Malkin, a San Diego–based interior designer and the author of several reference books on health-care design. “The place where patients spend their time 24/7 is treated as if it’s back-of-the-house.”

What the article didn’t go on to do was prescribe an solution: bulldoze old hospitals?  Make medical treatment virtual?  Open retail clinics?

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.

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 >>

My wife and I have been watching the latest wave of reality TV shows — Oprah’s Big Give, etc. — and I thought, with all the new rankings of hospitals and physicians out there, perhaps we could combine the two.

I title it “America’s Next Top Surgeon” and it would go something like this.

We pick 10 nationally ranked surgeons (thanks, Castle Connolly) and run them through a series of surgery-related challenges — Surprise! Today you’re a nurse; Surprise! Today you operate without lighting! — while judges look on and score the results: “When you told that family their terminally ill father wasn’t going to make it, I just didn’t feel the sincerity I’d hoped to.”

For judges, I’m thinking Steve Case from Revolution Health, Kerry Hicks from HealthGrades, and maybe Randy Jackson from American Idol since he had gastric bypass surgery. (”That closing technique was off the hook, dawg!”)

At the end of every episode, one surgeon would be excised from the show: “I’m sorry doctor, it’s time to hang up your scrubs.”

The winner would get a 64-CT scanner, da Vinci robot, and a Gamma Knife.

ABC, CBS — give me a call. We’re talking at least 13 share points.