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As mentioned yesterday, we’re losing our two beloved Interns.   If you know of anyone in the Boston or Houston area who would like to intern with us, have them send a quick resume with contact information to jobs[at]medtouch.com

Company Profile

Since 2004, MedTouch has been delivering cutting-edge online marketing programs, web sites, and integrated technology solutions and shamelessly promoting its clients’ successes.  Those clients include very large to very small hospitals in 20 states throughout the United States.  They engage us because we’re honest, smart, hard-working, and fun!  If you’re interested in online marketing, social network marketing, or healthcare, then come talk to us.

Unapologetically Genius Marketing Internship Description

Our next successful intern will be a preternaturally gifted marketing and communications genius.

Ok, still reading?

Now, we’ll ask you to bring your genius and come and learn about how healthcare in this country works and apply that genius to an industry whose economics are confusing, odd, and overly cumbersome – even to people working in that industry.

You’ll need to be self-motivated and jump right in.   You’ll work on marketing for our company, perform research, and work on projects for our clients.   During your time, we’ll give you tremendous leeway to develop your own “final” project.  For one intern, it was creating assessment tool to segment potential clients; for another, it was a YouTube video done with cut and paste drawings explaining why hospitals websites are so ugly.

We’ll give you the barest introduction and then throw you right in.  We’ll treat you like a team member and demand the best from you the way we demand the best from all of us.  Then we’ll kick your butt at Guitar Hero at one of our parties.

To apply, send a brief cover letter explaining why you’re a genius and a bio or resume to jobs[at]medtouch.com. We’ll invite a few geniuses in for interviews in early September.

Revenues Increased 110 Percent from Same Period Last Year Thanks to Rising Demand for Health Care Marketing Organizations to Reach, Influence, and Recruit Online.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–MedTouch, the leading provider of interactive, web-based solutions for health care organizations, announced that its revenue doubled due to its expansion into search marketing, social media marketing, and physician recruitment online.

“The greatest challenge of health care marketers is the fact that they have almost no way of knowing which consumers to target. Hospital information systems think ‘patient’ is a terminal condition — it ends in discharge or death,” said Paul Griffiths, CEO of MedTouch. “The Internet has empowered consumer choice as never before and yet, hospital marketing groups are still too often left in the dark, relying on traditional media with diminishing response rates. We can change that.”

MedTouch’s technology platform, ContentBridge, deploys sites in half the time and provides superior search engine optimization. Coupled with its social media strategies, MedTouch delivers measurable results in less time for less money than anyone else in the market.

Matthew Dillingham, Vice President of Client Services and Strategy, cited MedTouch’s particular strength in unifying cutting edge Web 2.0 technology with its own ContentBridge platform.

“In the first six months of this year, we saw thirteen client sites go live. We’ve tuned our software and services to deliver at whole new level,” Dillingham added. “While our growth may seem dramatic, it is consistent with our plans and expectation of the changes to come.”

About MedTouch

MedTouch delivers web intelligence for healthcare. Whether delivering web sites, online marketing programs, or empowered technology with provable ROI, MedTouch is dedicated to shamelessly promoting its clients’ success. Those clients include nationally-ranked academic medical centers, community hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, health plans, and health care-related not-for-profits.

One of the funny things about running a web company in the healthcare space is that there’s a lot of interest from the venture capital community.   And about once a month, someone from a VC firm will call me up, ask me a few questions about the space, and conclude that yes, we don’t need their money.  (Admittedly, I start the conversations with, “I’m happy to talk to you, but we’re not looking for your money…” so this idea has been well-planted in their minds.)

Yesterday it was Michael Segal, from Bessemer Venture Partners, whose name I mention as I promised him I would: he subscribes to a Google Alert for such name dropping events such as these.  Bessemer is a fine fund — one of two family-run VC firms that I know of which has thrived — Venrock, from the Rockefeller family ventures, being the other. 

I always enjoy these conversations since they follow a predictable pattern: the caller has attended Harvard, is learning about the healthcare space, inquires about competitors, asks about our products, asks about the market, concludes with a vague interest and I suggest if they ever have questions about the space, they should feel free to call.  

I never hear from them again.

I’m not knocking VCs — in fact, someday I think it’d be fun to join the ranks – but their job is increasingly hard given the stock market, decreasing talent who can run large companies, and a shrinking need for their services.   Thanks to web technology becoming less expensive every day, the need for $10m or $20m has been cut to a few hundred grand.   That’s actually tough for VC firms since they want to put the most amount of money in the most likely winners and focus their portfolio on what they need to manage.  If you had a choice between putting $10m to work in one company or $1m in 10 companies, which would you pick?

I’d go for the latter, but that’s my outlook as a passive investor.  When you’re managing a $350m fund, you pick the former, believe it or not.

So why the ramblings about VCs other than to tweak my new acquaintance?  Nearly every HIT vendor needs to take outside capital to get a company going because of the sales cycle in healthcare.   If one were to custom build an application for a specific hospital and then try and roll it out globally, you will fail. 

The sales/marketing cycle for healthcare is easily 18 months, often much, much longer.   HIT companies need to capitalize accordingly.  In other words, hosptials are loathe to make decisions quickly and that drives up their costs, which requires outside capital to fund the sales cycle, and that drives up the costs.   And when the companies are big enough and need to pay back the VCs?  They go public… which drives up the costs.  So anytime you see large amounts of outside funding flowing into a healthcare company, especially when they are profitable, you can be sure prices will rise within 18 to 24 months.

All that said, I don’t see any other way for HIT vendors to get into the business except if you’re lucky or very, very good coming out of the gate.

In the (admittedly small) market that we are in, MedTouch is known for delivering results at a considerably higher quality and at a very fair price, still less than what others charge.  I think that’s such a competitive advantage, I’m not sure we’d trade that for a few million in funding we wouldn’t need anyway.  Maybe someday, we’ll have the Starbucks-sized idea, but for now, we’re content to get smarter with each new client – and boy, do we have some exciting announcements coming out regarding new clients — as the industry moves away from e-health and towards Health 2.0

More about that change, later this week…

UPDATE: A had some complaints from VCs about a comparison I made to the banking industry, which I thought was a fair critique given it wasn’t the point of this article.  Hence, rescinded. 

I’m back from the AMA Houston SIG meeting on healthcare and technology, presented by:

Plus Katie Laird, from Schipul, moderated the panel.  

We had about two hours to present, take questions, and wrap it up.  I felt the Q&A could have gone on for another two hours, the audience was so engaged.   The most helpful aspect was that each presentation built on the previous.  Ours was focused on why healthcare was changing due to social media and then Chris and Jennifer followed up with the successes and challenges of from an inside the hospital point-of-view.  (Chris does it because it’s a clear passion, in the midst of other jobs; Jennifer is fortunate enough to have this be her full-time position.)  Jay, from CareFlash, finished up with a demo of sorts to show the benefits of social networks to the caregiving community.

My favorite thing about speaking at conferences — aside from my desire to one day be a talking head over a blue screened city backdrop on CNN – is that it’s a rare time when I can be completely honest with my opinions since the room is not full of clients at varying stages of engagement with what we’re doing.   That resulted in a neat exchange with an attendee (Richard Laurence Baron) on his blog over his concerns that I predicted the death of the written word (I didn’t, but you could take some comments that way) and what it meant for his life as a freelancer (hopefully, more work for more innovative.)

Most of all, this conference forced me to examine our embrace of social media for the company — we now have a MedTouch Twitter page; thank you Jennifer — and our clients.   For example, I’ve had this blog sitting outside our main site because I wanted to make sure that I’d write enough to keep it up (it’s been a year!) and also, I wasn’t sure our point of view would warrant exposing it to every visitor to our site.  Thanks to this conference, I’ve figured it out, so in a few weeks, we’re going to tear this down and rebuild it stronger.

Until then, feel free to talk to us about your hospital’s social media needs.

Yup, it’s official: we announced the opening of the MedTouch Houston office.

My favorite thing about my job is coming up with quotes such as:

“Houston is an increasingly important and growing healthcare mecca, and developing a ground-level presence in the region demonstrates a commitment to being thought leaders in our industry,” said Paul Griffiths, CEO of MedTouch.

SPRING WEBINAR SERIES

5 Things IT & Marketing Should Know About Each Other
IT and marketing have been known to disagree… Who owns the website? Marketing or IT? Through this webinar we will provide insight on how to interact with “those guys”. Do the people in IT need to learn SWOT? Do the guys in marketing need to get the newest version of Guitar Hero? These, and many more questions will be answered during this webinar.

Register Now!

Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Thursday, May 1, 2008
2pm EST | 1pm CST | Noon MST | 11am PST

I Am Too Pretty To Do Math: Ideas and best practices that will help your web site become more than a cost center
Most hospital web sites are still considered a box that needs to get checked off on the “to do list”. Well it is more than that, and we will provide best practices and ideas on how to communicate that your site is a living, breathing ROI machine that is not only a marketing tool, but is the key to your hospital’s overall success.

Register Now!

Wednesday, May 29, 2008
Thursday, May 30, 2008
2pm EST | 1pm CST | Noon MST | 11am PST

Will It Search: How Search Engines are Changing the Way You Develop Your Website
Search engines are looking at more than your content, and so are your patients. This webinar will explain how video, images, blogs, user generated content and other new media are changing the way people search and find things. This will not only change your web site strategy, but your hospital strategy as well.

Register Now!

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
Thursday, June 12th, 2008
2pm EST | 1pm CST | Noon MST | 11am PST

The Web as a Visual Medium, Part II
It’s not your father’s marketing. The Web has changed how marketers market. Or at least it should. If your website looks and acts like a brochure you will want to attend this webinar. We will discuss how the Internet has changed how people look for information and what they expect when coming to your site.

Register Now!

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
2pm EST | 1pm CST | Noon MST | 11am PST

In House or Out House: Does Your Organization Have the Internal Resources to Develop a Great Web Presence
See what it takes to run a successful in-house web department, and how to recognize when you need help. This webinar will explain how the Internet is changing so quickly, and what you need to do as an in-house manager to stay ahead of the curve.

Register Now!

Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
2pm EST | 1pm CST | Noon MST | 11am PST

The press keeps coming in about our Southwestern Vermont Medical Center recruitment:

Recently, the hospital has looked to new ways to recruit physicians to the area. The SVMC’s recruiting Web site recently won an award from the Interactive Media Council. The site, according to a hospital release, was the first hospital Web site ever to receive such an award.The site, www.greenmtnsgreatdocs.org, was launched in October and later given the award by the IMC, a nonprofit organization of Web designers, developers, programers, advertisers and other professionals. The site was conceived by Kevin Robinson, communications director at SVMC, and Nicole Goswami, physician recruiter, McDonald said.

The Web site has “helped our physician recruiting efforts greatly,” Robinson said in a release. “We’ve been able to fill several open positions already and haveover100 physicians who have expressed interest in SVMC. In just a few months, we’ve hired more physicians than we did in all of 2006.”

The site was created by MedTouch, a company that specializes in Web design for health care organizations.

You can follow the link to read the entire piece on the award winning recruitment website.

When you speak at tradeshows as I often do, there’s a relief in going first.  Our good friend Kevin Robinson from SVHC helped us with our talk yesterday.   What I thought was going to be the more interesting side of the story — all the research and thinking that went into targeting how to whom we designed the website — turned out to be less interesting than the actual campaign and the results. 

The campaign started due to a 25 position shortage on a staff only comprising 140 docs.  SVHC has a great internal recruiter, but they were still shelling out major dollars for outside help as well.  The worst part was they had only 10 viable candidates in their application pool for 25 positions in September – the beginning of recruiting season.  A bad situation for sure.

Well, we were a little more than halfway through the talk and explain our approach and how and why things work and an attendee raised their hand to ask, “Ok, it’s a nice site, but how did you measure results?  Visitors?  Hits?”

Nope.  Docs hired.

Everyone who had been half-paying attention sat up straight. 

The next question: “How many docs did you hire?”

We increased the application pool from 10 to 120, signed 10 doctors in the last 6 months, and are on track to have committments from all 25 open positions this year. 

More stunned silence.

And then I realized, the research was good and all, but the results are what made this a successful project and worthy of talking about.  We probably should have loaded that up front and then gone back over the strategy. 

In chatting about it after with my co-presenters Kevin and Sarah,  I realized my fear was the take away might be “all I need is to put up some videos on a website,” when the actual work was much more sophisticated and focused than that. 

Here’s a link to the Southwestern Vermont Professionals Recruitment Website again for those who haven’t seen it.

We’ll likely re-give the talk as a webinar in May, so keep your eyes peeled. 

More press about us. Good timing too, since we’re speaking at CBM together.

BENNINGTON - By emphasizing the Southern Vermont lifestyle to doctors on their new recruitment Web site, local hospital officials have increased the number of potential recruits by about tenfold.Southwestern Vermont Medical Center’s physician recruiting Web site, on the Internet at www.greenmtnsgreatdocs.org, includes such features as a video with testimony from doctors who already work at the Bennington hospital, doctor profiles, links to available housing and a list of open positions.Kevin Robinson, communications director for the hospital’s parent organization, Southwestern Vermont Health Care, pointed out that the site also appeals to a potential recruit’s private life.

Read the full story.

 We’re so proud of our latest launch, St Dominic-Jackson Memorial Hospital’s website.

It was a fun project and incorporates a lot of our newest ideas on how to manage dense layers of information and meet different audience requirements.  Plus, working with their internal IT team, we launched several patient-focused applications to deliver a much more functional site as well.

Read the full article about how MedTouch launched St. Dom’s new site.