Call it an Advisory Board, a Focus Group, a Patient Board or Patient Council. Whatever you choose to call the group of patients you meet with regularly, you need to have a group of patients you meet with regularly.
Why start an Advisory Board?
As healthcare embraces technology to improve patient outcomes, streamline operations, and lower costs, the technologies with the most impact are the ones that Make Things Simpler.
One of the most basic ways to simplify a complex process to is remove friction
The electronic medical record removes the friction of paper records finding, handling, storing, and securing them – all the things that can get between the critical information on the page and the physician who needs it. A smartphone removes the friction of needing to be near a desktop to read and send email, get contact information, and securely access practice and hospital documents and patient data. This technology provides value by simplifying a process to its core so that time, effort and resources are not wasted on mishaps, transportation, and basic human inertia.
Now, think about your practice’s web content: the basic information and elevator pitch about your services that you want to communicate to existing and future patients. Your content is the reason you have a website in the first place and you should always be looking for ways to get eyeballs in front of it. Email lists, Facebook and Twitter, direct mail and practice brochures are all designed to connect people with your content to drive business to your practice. If someone sees a link to your content while they’re at their computer, then the only friction you’ll encounter is getting them to click to go to your page.
But what about all the mobile time your potential customers spend?
If they see an advertisement – TV, billboard, print that has the URL (web address) you want to send them to, they will have to bypass a lot of potential friction before they see your content. They have to:
- Commit to going to the website later
- Remember the URL, and why they wanted to go to in the first place
- Follow through with this commitment and remember how and why they wanted to go to the page
- Type the URL into a browser
With social media and email campaigns that are usually accessed through internet enabled PCs or mobile devices, a simple link enables you to bypass all of this potential friction because theres a fairly good chance that your customer will either click the link immediately, or possibly bookmark it to check it out later (enabling a much easier recall). But with print, public, and televised advertising campaigns the odds are the customer doesn’t have either:
- An internet enabled device on them at the moment, or
- The time or inclination to check out the website immediately- and if they did, they would encounter more friction typing the address into their mobile.
So how can you overcome this friction, and get the benefits of the simplicity of a link in a real world marketing situation? One way is with Quick Response (QR) codes.
A QR code is a two-dimensional barcode that can be quickly and easily read by a fairly simple piece of software to communicate a piece of information: text, or a phone number or other contact information, or a web address to direct a phone’s web browser. Most of the QR Codes themselves are a small jumble of black and white pixelated dots that sort of resemble a digital bacteria or some sort of computer life form. But in many ways, Quick Response (or QR) codes are like hyperlinks that exist in our physical lives. By installing a small program on your phone, and then taking a picture of the code with your phone, you can immediately access the information embedded within.
- See a newspaper ad about a sale at one of your favorite stores, and scan the QR code to get a link to a coupon for an additional discount, or to register to be told about other upcoming sales.
- See a TV commercial about a new restaurant, where scanning the code on TV leads your phone to a website to make reservations for dinner, or receive a special two-for-one deal.
- See a poster at a health fair booth and scan the QR code to get an instant calculator app that gives you easy exercise options for someone your age with your level of physical fitness.
By removing the friction of telling someone about web content without giving them the ability to access it automatically, QR Codes lubricate the entire person education process. A QR Code on a brochure can facilitate initial contact with the patient by sending them to a website to get more information, or book an appointment, whereas a phone number to call with more info, or even just the practice’s web address means a patient is left to go the rest of the way on their own. On top of that, a QR code is a simple and effective way to improve your image as an organization on both a technical and user friendly front, and QR codes are flexible enough to handle a lot of different applications in your practice:
- Flyers about annual checkup services: (blood pressure, weight management, mammograms) that your patients see as they leave (often when most motivated to seek additional services) can include links to more information (general info sites, government warnings, approved resource sites, treatment communities) or redirect to content on your site or blog.
- Advertisements for surgical procedures and contain codes to access before and after pictures and patient testimonials, or to a landing page to submit requests for more information.
By streamlining the process of fulfilling a patient’s request to tell me more, QR Codes give practices an easy (and did I mention free) way to build relationships, influence patient health choices and outcomes, direct patients to the content you choose for them, and even send the message that your practice is on the leading edge of technology.
Five steps to start using QR codes in your practice right away
- Decide how QR Codes fit into your overall marketing and education effort. Which real-world situations do you want to link to web content?
- Setting up a QR plan doesn’t have to involve a big up-front expense. Use free programs like Kaywa (http://qrcode.kaywa.com/) to generate codes for your campaigns, and free readers like i-nigma for iPhone (http://itunes.apple.com/us/
app/i-nigma-4-qr-datamatrix- ) and QRDroid for Android (https://market.android.com/barcode/id388923203?mt=8 details?id=la.droid.qr ) to get started right away - Think carefully about where you place the codes themselves. You want people to have access to the info, without making the code itself the center of the message. The code is the link to more, not the point of the marketing effort. And make sure people can see and frame the code easily enough that they don’t struggle to scan it. Don’t add friction now!
- Don’t assume everyone knows what the code is, or what to do with it. Give them a clear call to action, complete with instructions. “Scan this code with a QR reader to receive (learn more, find out, book now…)”
- Make sure the payoff at the other end of the code is worth the effort. Give them some real value for their scan. It could be a discount, it could be exclusive, valuable, it could be a frictionless way to make an appointment with you (win-win!), but don’t have people scan if the effort won’t be rewarded with real value.
Grand Rounds is a weekly summary of the best healthcare writing online, featuring stories, opinion and analysis from doctors, nurses, patients, researchers and administrators, as well as journalists. Each Tuesday, a different blogger takes the helm, publishing a new edition of Grand Rounds on their site. Each edition features the hosts picks for the ten best healthcare links of the week.
This week, one of my very favorite bloggers hosts Grand Rounds, Dr. Bryan Vartabedian of the famed blog 33charts.com. Dr. V. is a pediatric gastroenterologist at Texas Children’s Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine. If you’ve never read Dr. V’s blog, try it – his writing is excellent.
Here’s his intro:
Welcome to this edition of Medical Grand Rounds. I scoured the web and pulled together what I think are some of the more interesting posts and news items of the past couple of weeks. Ive tried to explore some voices that perhaps havent crossed your radar. Weve got sociologists, medical students, IT gurus, medical futurists and even a couple of doctors. Some of the discussions have related posts that you might find interesting. Posts are not listed in any particular order.
Give yourself a little gift and click here to read Grand Rounds.
At Manage My Practice, we have always been fascinated by the opportunities created when innovation and technical advancements are applied to the Healthcare system. The intersection of technology and medical practice has always been one of the most exciting spaces in research and development because the challenges of the Human Body are some of the most daunting and emotionally charged of our endeavors. Curing diseases, diagnosing symptoms and improving and saving lives are among our most noble callings, so naturally they inspire some of our brightest thinkers and industry leaders.
As managers, providers and employees, we always have to be looking ahead at how the technology on our horizon will affect how our organizations administer health care. In the spirit of looking forward to the future, we present “2.0 Tuesday”, a weekly feature on Manage My Practice about how technology is impacting our practices, and our patient and group outcomes.
We hope you enjoy looking ahead with us, and share your ideas, reactions and comments below!
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Steve Jobs thought iCloud had the potential to store Medical Data
Apple’s recently announced iCloud service let’s you store pictures, movies, music, and documents in Apple’s “cloud”, or Internet storage system, and retrieve them with your iPhones, iPods, iPads, and Mac computers. Dr. Iltifat Husain, writing for the IMedicalApps blog notes that in the new biography of the Apple founder, Jobs mentioned that he thought even personal medical data would one day be stored in Apple’s iCloud. Cloud storage is all the rage right now in a lot of different areas of technology, but Jobs saying that medical data would be stored on the consumer end next to vacation photos and favorite songs represents a very bold vision of the future of patient data.
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Researchers using Social Media to study attitudes about Public Health
A team led by Marcel Salath, PhD at Pennsylvania State University published a study last month in PLoS Computational Biology that used “tweets” gathered from the social network Twitter to analyze how the public felt about the H1N1 influenza vaccine in 2009. Although Social Media research has limitations, Christine S. Moyer, writing for the American Medical Association’s Amednews.com notes that the results were similar to traditional phone surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control, and provides some other examples of how Social Media has been used to understand public health trends.
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Interesting EHR/EMR data from the Soliant Health Blog
Medical staffing specialist Soliant Health had very eye-opening list of statistics about EHR/EMR implementations on their blog last week. My personal favorite: Hospitals using EHR/EMR systems have a 3 to 4% lower mortality rate than those that dont. Very interesting numbers.
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HealthWorks Collective predicts changes in healthcare communications after ACA
Healthworks Collective‘s Susan Gosselin makes some predictions about how the communications between and among providers and patients are going to be changed by the Affordable Care Act (or Healthcare Reform)- and what both groups will demand from a changing system. Great stuff!
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Oregon to help disabled voters cast ballots using iPads
In today’s local and congressional elections, five counties in the state of Oregon are going to be equipping local officials with iPads preloaded with special touch-interface software to accompany people with physical or visual impairments, or who would otherwise have a hard time making it to the polls. The 9 to 5 Mac blog is reporting that the pilot program features hardware donated by Apple, and could soon spread statewide by the next election.
Be sure to check back next week for another 2.0 Tuesday!
The Third Annual Health Care Social Media Summit took place on the Mayo Clinic campus in Rochester, Minnesota last week, and to my chagrin, I was unable to attend. Lots of good information and resources were shared, including this video. It was posted on YouTube on October 14th and has already been viewed more than 10,000 times.
Mayo Clinic wouldn’t mind if the video went viral, but really wants the message to go viral. For information about installing the “Know Your Numbers” app on your hospital or practice Facebook page, contact Makala Johnson at Johnson.Makala@mayo.edu.
The healthcare website that had its humble beginnings as a digital brochure has morphed into one of the most important resources a practice has. Your website must be able to:
- attract and capture new patients,
- retain and engage existing patients,
- provide a platform for information and education,
- gather consumer feedback,
- be a two-way communication tool, and
- distinguish your practice as an authority.
Here’s how to manage this very important resource, choose the right professionals to be your practice’s partners in success, and spend your financial resources wisely.
Let’s define the professionals.
Web Designer: A web designer focuses on the look and feel of a website and leverages good aesthetic sense to make a website enticing and visually pleasing.
Web Developer: A web developer is focused on the way your website works. Web developers have strong programming skills and are responsible for maintaining your website and ensuring it functions well. This person may also be called a Webmaster or Site Administrator.
Web Host: Web Hosting providers give you storage in their data centers for web pages, files and databases that make your website an interactive experience for your patients, employees and stakeholders. Your web host is responsible for keeping your site secure and available 24/7.
Website Software
You can have a web professional custom code a website for you from scratch, but that is not necessary, efficient, cost-effective or smart. We’ve been advocates of using blog software for websites for years for two reasons. One, the cost of using a blogging platform as software for your website is free. Two, you have control of the site and can make simple changes and post content with ease yourself. The most popular blog software, and the software we use at Manage My Practice is WordPress. With blogging software, even beginners (the manager or a staff member) can learn the basic process of tweaking information and adding information, keeping the practice website current.
Website Design
Do you need a website designer? Absolutely not!
Should you use a website designer? Absolutely!
Last week I gave a talk to a group of Transworld salespeople from across the United States. Transworld is the top name in collections across a variety of industries and they asked me to give a presentation on “How to Use Social Media to Reach Your Target Audience,” with the target audience being…people like you and me: managers, administrators, healthcare executives, and pretty much anyone in healthcare dealing with patient accounts receivables.
I described how much harder it is for today’s manager to make time to meet with salespeople. More than ever administrators are pulled in a million different directions, and it is not unusual for a manager’s priorities to shift from day to day and hour to hour. This must be incredibly frustrating for the salesperson who is trying to keep things flowing, but it’s a fact of life in healthcare.
Chris Brogan
In my talk I featured the work of two gentleman who really get how social media can positively impact sales. Chris Brogan is a prolific author and consultant who always has an interesting perspective on social media. I discussed his ideas around the sales circle as opposed to the sales cycle. You can read about it here.
Asking for feedback can be tough.
Asking for feedback as a physician or care provider is unexplored territory for most practices.
My primary care provider has a simple and effective way to ask patients to leave feedback online.
As social media matures and more healthcare groups gain experience using it, we understand more about it and the role it will play in the future of healthcare.
Last week, Abraham and I gave a program called “Starting the Conversation: An Introduction to Using Social Media In Healthcare” to a group of healthcare managers. We discussed social media’s potential to influence patient satisfaction, which is expected to influence reimbursement.
I had a great time recently when Joe Hage of Medical MarCom interviewed me during a Twitter Chat. The topic was how medical device reps could help specialty physicians market to primary care physicians. You can read the interview here at Joe’s blog.
So, what is a Twitter Chat? It’s a one-hour event that gathers together Twitter users with a specific interest to share a discussion 140 characters at a time.
Twitter chats are organized by hashtags, and in this case, the discussion was marked by the hashtag #MedDevice. #MedDevice is facilitated by Joe Hage (@MedicalMarCom is Joe’s Twitter name) who is the founder and CEO of a medical devices marketing consulting firm specializing in marketing communications, marketing strategy, lead generation, web development, and social media.
