Google Mobile-First Indexing: Is Your Healthcare or Hospital Website Ready? Written by SQHealth-admin on November 22, 2017. Posted in Connect. The Long-Awaited Change in How Google Will Rank Healthcare and Hospital Websites is Just About Here Since 2016, my colleagues in the SEO blogosphere have been regularly waxing about the importance of being prepared for Google to roll out its “mobile-first indexing.” Although it hasn’t yet to be launched, it is coming—and when it does, it is expected to have significant impacts on how healthcare and hospital Websites are ranked. In recent months, several of our healthcare SEO and hospital Website design customers have asked us about mobile-first indexing. Here are some of their most frequently asked questions. As you read on, ask yourself: Is your hospital’s Website and SEO ready? What is Google Mobile-First Indexing? Google’s mobile-first indexing is the search engine’s conversion to using a mobile Website (rather than its desktop version) for ranking Web pages. As to why they are doing this, Google offered this explanation on its Official google Webmaster Central Blog: “Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. However, our ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate its relevance to the user. This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher.” How Will Mobile-First Indexing Affect My Healthcare SEO? If your mobile Website provides the same information as your desktop Website, you probably won’t notice any difference in your SEO rankings. Actually, you might even see a boost in your rankings if you are competing against hospitals whose Websites are not ready for mobile-first indexing. You might now be thinking, “What do you mean by ‘the same information?’” Why would it be different on a desktop or mobile Website? The short answer is: It mostly depends on how your desktop and mobile Websites were design. This means: • If you have a newer Website that was built with responsive design — meaning the site automatically adjusts its layout based on whether your visitors are using desktop or mobile browsers — you probably don’t need to worry. • If your Website isn’t “responsive” but sends the same layout no matter the browser, you also probably don’t need to worry. (Note: Because responsive Websites generally deliver better user experiences, comparable Websites with responsive design will likely have better rankings.) • If your Website uses different URLs for canonical and mobile browsers, you might not be sending the same information. This could range from minor inconsistencies between what is on the desktop and mobile pages to significantly abridged content on a mobile page. • If your mobile Website uses AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), you might not be sending the same information. A typical example of different information would be when an AMP shows a snippet of a desktop page with a link to read it in its entirety. These types of AMPs will hurt your SEO because it’s not supporting what Google considers to be a positive user experience. If your Website is not ready for mobile-first indexing, it’s probably best to update or overhaul your Website to a responsive design. But, if budgetary or time constraints prohibit that, your best bet is to prioritize the Web pages that can’t afford to be dinged by mobile-first indexing and start analyzing/updating them. When Does My Hospital Website Need to be Ready for Mobile-First Indexing? For all the chatter there’s been the past year about mobile-first indexing and the need to be ready for it, there’s still no set date for when Google will enact it. There is a good possibility that Google has been testing this new indexing strategy over the past year and we won’t see an exact date for its final roll-out. Our recommendation is to be proactive now before you see a drop in visitors to your Website. As Sequence Health’s Associate Director of Search Engine Marketing, Susan Gullion is one of our most knowledgeable resources for enhancing our healthcare clients’ search engine marketing strategies with SEO, PPC and social media. Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
Why In-house Services Are Among the Best Ways to Increase Revenues in Bariatric Medical Offices Written by SQHealth-admin on October 30, 2017. Posted in Bariatric Surgery, Manage. Be Careful: Advantages Can Quickly be Outweighed by Risks, Especially If Not Properly Managed With ObesityWeek2017 beginning tomorrow, many of the attending bariatric surgery doctors, nurses and administrators will be visiting the event’s exhibitor hall to discover the latest innovations for improving bariatric practice revenues. As a regular ObesityWeek exhibitor, Sequence Health has regularly used the opportunity to listen to customers—a topic we discussed in a recent blog, “You Can’t Hit a Target Blindfolded: Why We Exhibit at ObesityWeek 2017 (and It’s Not Why You May Think)”. One thing we’ve learned (not mentioned in that blog) is that more and more bariatric clinics are offering in-house services to boost revenue and to reap other rewards. Bariatric practices give up an estimated 80 percent of overall patient spend to hospitals for ancillary services. Much of that can be recovered by expanding in-house services to include cardiac testing, bone density scanning and even endoscopy. Other services such as medi-spa, nutrition and cosmetic procedures like Botox can provide additional sources of revenue for bariatric surgery practices. Although bringing these services in-house can sometimes require significant investment in equipment and training, return on investment (ROI) is often swift. They can yield other advantages that include: • Reduced liability: In-house services give providers additional opportunities to monitor patient progress and identify areas that need to be addressed before they worsen to the point that they exhibit clinically. • Reinforced patient confidence: In-house services and patient engagement tools can validate patients’ concerns about their providers’ expertise, ability to understand their cases to providee optimal care. How to Manage Risk with In-House Bariatric Services Opportunities to improve bariatric surgery revenues and outcomes with in-house services come with additional responsibilities. Practices that bring services in-house have to be even more on top of their game when it comes to tracking patient progress or they risk the worst kind of delays: those caused by inefficient record keeping or miscommunication. When bariatric surgery clinics add in-house services, the chances to makes mistakes grow because they increase the volume of specialists and tests that must be completed in a specific order. Any delay in the process moves downstream and clogs up the works. And thus, it only takes one misread lab test, physician on vacation, or misplaced record to negatively impact a clinic’s entire schedule. In our experience, there are two keys to success in this context: • Knowing exactly what service is needed and what keeps patients on the most efficient path to positive experiences and outcomes. It’s crucial to track every clearance that a patient has completed and what comes next on their care path, even when they are specifically tailored to individual patients. Any necessary alterations should be recorded in real-time so every member of the care team can have immediate visibility into what changed and why. • Keeping patients informed about their progress is equally important. Interactive features like short quizzes complete the feedback loop and inform providers what information has been presented and comprehended by their patient. This gives providers an additional platform for increasing patient awareness about which services to expect next and which optional services may interest them. Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
Will Chrome 62 TLS/SSL Requirements Affect Your Users’ Experiences or Your Online Rankings? Written by SQHealth-admin on October 13, 2017. Posted in Connect. Now is the Time to Update Your Hospital Website Encryption to Avoid the Dreaded Chrome 62 ‘Not Secure’ Label As 2016 came to a close, we published a blog with a title that asked a simple but important question: “Is Your Hospital Website Secure Enough for Google in 2017?” Now in October 2017, the Chrome SSL Warning question is more relevant than ever. This month, Google is expected to release Chrome 62, which will mark Website pages without TLS/SSL encryption as “Not Secure”. It’s never too late to get your Website’s security up to spec for Chrome or all other browsers. But because this update may also impact your healthcare search engine optimization (SEO) and digital healthcare marketing results, there is no time like the present to make sure you are compliant for Chrome 62 and beyond. Is Your Hospital Website ‘Secure’ for Chrome? First, test your hospital Website’s security on Chrome: • Open your Chrome browser • Type in your hospital Website address • Let the page load • Look for the icon that appears in the address bar to the left of the URL Do you see a green lock icon in the address bar? • Yes! Hooray, your hospital Website is secure! • No! Sorry, but your Website is not what Chrome considers “secure.” Chrome 62’s Greatest Threat: Your Conversions and Patient Acquisition for All Web Browsers It’s no secret that Google wants you to use TLS/SSL security. Along with the implications of its upcoming Chrome 62 update, even as early as 2014, Google has been clear it would give more SEO juice to secured Websites. There continues to be no hard evidence that not having a secure hospital Website will hurt your Page rank, SERP positions, etc. What is certain is that not having a TLS/SSL will very like hurt your Website conversions—and thus, your patient acquisition rates. This cuts across all Web browsers, too. There are two reasons for this. • You Must Respect Chrome’s Popularity: Chrome’s status as the most widely used Web browser (estimated to be used by at least 55 percent of all Internet users) means anything that keeps you from using it for patient acquisition is a major disadvantage. If your Website is not secure, you are potentially discouraging more than half of your entire Website visitor traffic to complete an online form. • Poor User Experiences Hurts SEO: If Chrome users suddenly start abandoning your Website because they are scared off by “Not Secure” warnings, sooner or later, it will drag your SEO down—which could result in lower traffic, and thus, lower conversions, regardless of browser. Patient Confidence: A Lesser Threat, but a Threat All the Same If you need one more reason to improve your Website security, let it be patient confidence in your brand. Although Website and internal EMR/EHR data (and their security) are usually two entirely separate things, with growing public awareness about healthcare cybersecurity risks, your visitors and patients may presume that if your Website is not secure, then the rest of your digital medical information isn’t either. As Sequence Health’s Associate Director of Search Engine Marketing, Susan Gullion is one of our most knowledgeable resources for enhancing our healthcare clients’ search engine marketing strategies with SEO, PPC and social media. Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
Google Tips for Medical & Healthcare SEO and PPC: August 2017 Written by SQHealth-admin on August 11, 2017. Posted in Connect. The New Google Search Console is Here As with so many things related to Google and healthcare SEO, this announcement may be a bit binary. It’s likely that you either already are aware of the Google Search Console (which has been around for more than a decade with various names, including “Google Webmaster Central” and “Google Webmaster Tools) and use it, or you don’t. If you are in the first camp, then you should be excited about the new features shared about the Console at the Google Webmaster Central blog. If you are in the latter, you will also likely find it exciting, not only because this free product “includes more than two dozen reports and tools covering AMP [Accelerated Mobile Pages], structured data, and live testing tools, all designed to help improve your site’s performance on Google Search,” but for a very important new report: Index Coverage. The other exciting and potentially related feature is better organizational workflow support. As Google explains, “multiple people are typically involved in implementing, diagnosing, and fixing issues,” which is why it is “introducing sharing functionality that allows you to pick-up an action item and share it with other people in your group.” The Takeaways If you know what search engine indexing is, then there’s no need to explain its importance to your hospital Website SEO. If you don’t know what indexing is, here’s a simple explanation: It’s the process of a search engine discovering (known as “crawling”) the contents of your Website (which is learned from a “site map”). Have you ever heard the philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?” Well, there’s no debate about indexing: If your hospital Website is not indexed, the search engines won’t crawl it, and nobody can search for it. Thus, the Index Coverage report is a very convenient tool to discover which of your hospital Website pages are (or more importantly, aren’t) being indexed—and what you can probably do to quickly fix problems. For that matter, the Console’s improved workflow capabilities should be beneficial no matter how experienced you are with the Console. For instance, if you handle your organization’s healthcare SEO and find an indexing problem but don’t know how to get a sitemap generated or submitted to search engines, you can now task this to the appropriate IT person/people. Google AdWords Express Rolls Out New “Goals” No matter whether your monthly healthcare PPC budgets are in the hundreds or the ten of thousands, demonstrating ROI (return-on-investment) is always crucial to ensuring the ongoing support for this type of digital healthcare marketing tactic. One of the best ways to achieve that is to be able to report “conversions,” which can now be measured as “goals” for Google AdWords Express users. In that context, this more likely is of interest to the healthcare PPC marketing with smaller campaigns—either in terms of budgets or ad volumes. That is because AdWords Express is Google’s comparatively leaner PPC tool that is “aimed to make it easy to set up ads on Google,” as compared to its more complex, full-scale AdWords service. AdWords Express now makes it possible to easily get performance metrics for goals that include: • Calls to Your Business • Visits to Your Storefront • Actions Taken on Your Website The Takeaways For more casual or smaller-scale healthcare PPC marketers, being able to track these goals can be very useful not only for your own edification about how well your campaigns are performing, but also to others in your organization involved with its marketing. For instance, hospital PPC ads that lead visitors to your hospital’s Website may earn you a “point” for your efforts, but getting visitors to your Website is only half the battle. The bigger goal for your organization should be to strategically drive those visitors to another conversion/goal/call-to-action, which you may improve by sharing your PPC goal metrics with whomever develops your hospital Website marketing objectives. Furthermore, more actively engaging with your healthcare PPC metrics may encourage you to expand the scope of your campaigns—including budgets and volumes (which may further inspire you to explore the potential of using the full-scale AdWords service). As Sequence Health’s Associate Director of Search Engine Marketing, Susan Gullion is one of our most knowledgeable resources for enhancing our healthcare clients’ search engine marketing strategies with SEO, PPC and social media. Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
Healthcare SEO: Google Tips for June 2017 Written by SQHealth-admin on June 29, 2017. Posted in Connect. A Look at the Latest Google Tips That Affect SEO for Hospitals and Medical Practices With just one more week before Independence Day, some might be entering the lazy days of summer—which, unfortunately, does not apply for healthcare SEO marketers! As we do each month, we have gathered the latest healthcare SEO Google tips that affect SEO hospitals and medical practices. And as always, the emphasis is on information for healthcare digital marketers that don’t monitor every event related to medical SEO. Google SERP Snippets No Longer Use DMOZ Snippets are the content that appear under the title in a search engine results page (SERP). As the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog explained, until recently, Google got that information from one of three sources—one of which, DMOZ.org, no longer exists, and thus, is no longer a source. The takeaway: If your hospital’s Website has been relying on DMOZ for snippets—or for that matter, another of the sources, page content—now is the time to explore the third source which gives you complete control of what appears in a snippet: description metadata. This is particularly true for high-volume pages or pages for which you heavily compete with other hospitals. Google’s “Create Good Titles and Snippets” is a solid place to start if you have never explored the description metadata—as well as providing instructions for how to prevent displaying a Snippet. [poll id=”13″] Google My Business Introduces New “Posts” Feature Although a small announcement, there are some massive possibilities for hospitals to take advantage of the new Posts feature on Google My Business. As the Google Small Business Blog explains, you can: “…publish your events, products, and services directly to Google Search and Maps. By creating posts, you can place your timely content in front of customers when they find your business listing on Google.” The takeaway: Google has been routinely improving My Business, which we’ve been following for months. In fact, along with frequent mentions in my monthly blog, we published “Top 2016 Google My Business Listing Changes for Online Healthcare Marketers” last December. So, if you have not yet established a My Business page (or pages, for matter) for your hospital, it might be worth your while since Google is clearly interested in making it a productive marketing tool. But, if you have already started exploring My Business, it could be an excellent way to engage new patients, especially if your analytics are demonstrating any type of traction for views but are not getting solid clickthroughs. Google AdWords Launches New “Smart Bidding” Option to Maximize Conversions If you use Google AdWords for your hospital pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, you likely have campaigns with Google AdWords—which means you are probably familiar with its various Smart Bidding options (i.e., “Target CPA,” “Target ROAS” and “Enhanced CPC”). There is now a new option, “Maximize Conversions,” that can be very useful for building hospital brand awareness. The takeaway: Usually, conversion-driven PPC campaigns have relatively higher budgets because they can be tied to metrics that demonstrate a campaign’s value and ROI. Therefore, this new Smart Bidding feature can be tremendously advantageous for healthcare PPC strategies that are designed to not only increase hospital Website traffic, but to leverage that traffic with conversions that ideally move visitors into the so-called “sales funnel.” As Sequence Health’s Associate Director of Search Engine Marketing, Susan Gullion is one of our most knowledgeable resources for enhancing our healthcare clients’ search engine marketing strategies with SEO, PPC and social media. Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
Three Key Takeaways For Success From ASMBS Weekend 2017 Written by SQHealth-admin on June 23, 2017. Posted in Bariatric Surgery, Company Overview. The American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery just wrapped up its ASMBS Weekend in San Diego. This flagship event was jam-packed with information on the latest trends in improving patient experience, outcomes and growth for providers. Though much of the content shared throughout the conference was clinical, we wanted to highlight some key takeaways from the practice management track. This sector of healthcare is evolving rapidly and several surgeons shared key drivers that they have seen propel their practices into improved efficiency and revenue generation. Enhance Your Digital Presence With 80% of patients turning to digital channels to seek healthcare information, a robust online presence is critical to attracting and engaging them. Most providers have become adept at developing websites rich in information, but social media platforms represent opportunities for increased growth. After attending a session led by Dr. Neil Floch (@NeilFlochMD) about the use of Twitter and the role it can play in healthcare, one provider/attendee, Dr. Paul Davidson (@PaulDavidsonPhD), saw a single well-crafted strategic tweet generate more than 10,000 impressions. Patients are more educated and empowered than ever before — they are talking to each other on social media, sharing stories, support and recommendations. Providers who are active on social media can increase engagement and increase the patient experience. They can become leaders in these conversations by creating their own closed Facebook groups that give patients a place to share information online. These can be viewed as virtual support groups that allow practices to create their own online communities, share clinical data, and help encourage and motivate patients. Practices can also host special Twitter talks that give existing and prospective patients a user-friendly forum to ask questions and share information. Many practices find that it often makes sense to work with marketing professionals for help leveraging digital channels. Online education sessions, such as video seminars, also keep patients engaged and reinforce the idea that they have made the right decision with the practice they have selected. In his session Internet/Website Strategies to Maximize Your Practice, Dr. Sunil Bhoyrul of Olde Del Mar Surgical told attendees that using a professional to create an online seminar, despite a steep price tag, easily paid for itself and improved his quality of life. He got his personal time back by not having to conduct in-person seminars and it reduced his legal liability by being able to have reports and insights demonstrating that the patient watched the entire online seminar and took quiz questions that reinforced the material. He also echoed the suggestions of other speakers by indicating the value of working with a professional to market your program and build a high-quality online seminar. Shift Healthcare Services In-House Bariatric practices see 80% of overall patient spend related to treatment fall into the hands of hospitals. Moving these services in-house achieves two goals: it streamlines the process for patients and enables them to get all of the clearances they need for surgery in a single day. It also brings more of that overall spend into the practice. Moving services in-house requires significant investment, but also provides rapid ROI. For example, a leading private-practice bariatric program spoke about the success they had after offering transnasal endoscopy services. This alternative to a traditional upper endoscopy doesn’t require sedation and can be completed in just five minutes. It also doesn’t require cleaning, so the time transitioning to the next patient is minimal. The practice calculated that it would need to perform around 250 TNE procedures to break even on its investment — it performed 1500 of the procedures in a 12-month period. That represents $420,000 in revenue, with about $360,000 in contribution margin. Patients love it, too, because they don’t have to go to a hospital, recover from sedation, and get driven home. The patient sits in an office chair with no sedation, just a numbing of the nose. The procedure can be completed along with all of their workup, allowing the patient to only miss one day of work. It’s more efficient and affordable to both the patient and the payer. Not all streams of income require significant investment. Bariatric Advantage has a revenue-sharing model with its bariatric-specific, ASMBS-guideline based supplements. For several physicians that spoke about their experience, they realized over fifty thousand dollars in annual revenue, which has zero overhead and is straight profit. It can also mitigate liability issues related to vitamin deficiency and bone-loss issues, which is becoming common, suggested by Dr. Eric DeMaria in his presentation Liability: How to Choose Your Insurance Carrier, Avoid Lawsuits and Survive Them. As this article indicates, Texas Medical Liability Trust has “seen an alarming increase in the number of claims filed related to Wernicke’s encephalopathy (WE) following bariatric surgery… involving allegations of failure to monitor thiamine levels in post-bariatric surgery patients and failure to treat symptoms… with thiamine supplementation.” The list of services that bariatric practices can consider shifting in-house include bone density scans, ultrasound, blood tests and esophageal motility testing, among others. Practices can also enhance the patient experience and boost revenue by offering other ancillary services in-house. Sleep studies, medispas, and even cosmetic surgeries like arm and neck lifts can offer a sense of “one-stop shopping” for services that bariatric patients need or desire, pre-and post surgery. This helps keep patients in the surgery pipeline because it reduces the time it takes to get to surgery. Every delay in the medical clearance process can lead to patients dropping out of the process and electing not to have the surgery or seeking a different provider. Service is as Important as Science Patients have many options for healthcare and they know it. Great physicians understand the importance of bedside manner, and this notion extends to all aspects of a practice. Understanding how patients enter and exit the program is key to enhancing their experiences with services that generate goodwill and loyalty. It starts with something as simple as how your staff answers the phone the first time the patient calls. This idea permeates the entire process. Practices should examine every aspect of the services they offer from the perspective of patients. Think of it like being a secret shopper. What services are valued by patients? An excellent example is insurance verification. This can be very complex for bariatric surgery, and a practice that relies exclusively on patients to verify their own coverage is putting a tremendous responsibility on the patient. Not verifying benefits results in a missed opportunity to provide a value-added service to the patient. It also leads to misinformation and patients wrongly thinking they have coverage or not understanding their true requirements for surgery. Providers who take ownership of the entire journey and take steps necessary to ensure patients are educated and informed each step of the way are rewarded with evangelist patients that become brand ambassadors. As Dr. Teresa LaMasters said, “the number one source of new patients? HAPPY PATIENTS!” What were your takeaways from ASMBS Weekend? Contact us today!
Bariatric Patient Acquisition Strategies: How to Get More Patients Written by SQHealth-admin on June 15, 2017. Posted in Bariatric Surgery, Connect. One question we are always asked is about how to get more bariatric patients, which naturally leads into discussions about bariatric patient acquisition strategies. Any discussion about acquiring new bariatric patients needs to address the “sales funnel process of finding leads, turning them into prospects, and then turning them into “customers” (or, put more accurately/appropriately, “patients”). What often surprises many people is the first part—finding leads and prospects—isn’t as difficult as it may seem. On the contrary, there’s no shortage of them; the challenge is advancing them through the final into the final stage. According to information presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Texas Association for Bariatric Surgery (which we attended), an estimated 85 percent of potential bariatric patients that express interest in weight-loss surgery fail to follow through and never receive the surgery. Consequently, they continue to experience morbid obesity, diabetes, sleep apnea, high blood pressure and a host of other medical issues—and your bariatric surgery center may fail to meet its goals for bariatric patient acquisitions. Of course, there are plenty of legitimate reasons why a candidate for bariatric surgery may not follow through. For example, medical insurance verification is often one hurdle, and patients must also make the mental, emotional and physical commitment involved (which speaks to the need to nurture them with patient engagement campaigns). How a Bariatric Patient Acquisition Strategy Can Make a Difference Without a bariatric patient acquisition strategy, the potential patients who investigate bariatric surgery via your Website are likely to slip away unnoticed—which emphasizes the importance of a strategy that includes new bariatric patient lead and tracking. Since most patients take at least a year to commit to bariatric surgery, your strategy must help them progress from one step to the next by providing the needed bariatric patient education, interacting with them to keep them engaged, and following-up as appropriate. Your strategy should also involve everything from checking your Website’s bariatric and weight-loss surgery SEO to make sure potential patients are finding you when they conduct online searches to using well-designed software to track patient engagement. Take a look at some specific tactics that should be part of your strategy to attract new bariatric patients. Top Tips to Improve Bariatric Patient Acquisition Rates If everyone in your bariatric surgery option is on the same digital page regarding patient acquisition, your efforts can team up to help you make a better connection to curious visitors. Try some of these tactics to increase your patient acquisition rates and engage your weight-loss surgery Website visitors. • Add menus and internal links to your Website pages. If visitors are learning about bariatric surgery options on one page of your Website, make it easy for them to click to your contact page or to a page where they can ask for more information, participate in a live chat or sign-up for an appointment. • Feature useful content. Add content to your site that your visitors will consider entertaining and valuable, including bariatric-friendly recipe videos, downloadable and printable recipe cards, and videos of testimonials from happy patients. • Offer online bariatric surgery seminars. Bariatric surgery seminars are often considered a requirement by insurance companies before they will authorize the procedure. More recently, online bariatric surgery seminars have been offered as an alternative to in-house seminars. Not only does this enable bariatric surgery centers to offer more options for new weight loss surgery patients to attend seminars at times and locations that are more convenient, but it also improves efficiency for busy bariatric surgeons and staff. • Capture visitor contact information. Give your site visitors every possible opportunity to share their e-mail addresses with you. Offer to e-mail free content to them to capture contact information. • Don’t forget the call to action. Every page on your Website should include a call to action, inviting the visitor to ask for more information or to make an appointment. This tactic is also valuable on your social media pages. Speaking of which… • Don’t neglect social media. Younger patients are more likely to find you on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter than they are to seek out your site. Stay fully engaged on social media to encourage interaction with your office. Kris Altiere is Sequence Health’s Director of Marketing and Creative. Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
Why and How to Optimize Hospital and Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management After EHR Adoption Written by SQHealth-admin on June 9, 2017. Posted in Manage. One of the many challenges of ensuring your healthcare organization’s longevity and profitability is to regularly adopt new technologies and best practices—which, after such adoptions, often requires an immediate evaluation of the new landscape after to determine what’s next. This is precisely the sentiment expressed in a recent RevCycle Intelligence article, “After EHR Adoption, Revenue Cycle Technology Modernization Begins,” and it is one we hear from our customers more frequently. This is interesting because although we are not an electronic health records vendor, we do offer patient management software as part of our Sequence patient engagement solutions platform, which enables healthcare providers to follow patients through the entire treatment process—and ultimately their optimize healthcare revenue cycle management. What is Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management? As the RevCycle Intelligence article explained, almost all healthcare providers—both hospitals and individual practices—have adopted electronic health record (EHR) software. Now that EHR adoption is in the proverbial rear-view mirror for most, healthcare revenue cycle management is now squarely in their new fields of vision. While many understand what EHR is and does, some might not fully grasp the same for healthcare revenue cycle management. Coincidentally, RevCycle Intelligence answered the question in another and appropriately titled article, “What Is Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management?” And although it’s explanation of what hospital revenue cycle management is was sufficient, it was what it said about what it does (or more specifically, when it happens) that perhaps best illustrates the concept: “Healthcare revenue cycle management begins when a patient makes his or her appointment to seek medical services and ends when all claims and patient payments have been collected. However, the life of a patient’s account is not as straightforward as it seems.” Determining Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management Objectives As implied in that explanation, healthcare revenue cycle management is a complex and not necessarily linear process. However, according to RevCycle Intelligence, “78 percent of hospitals still use a manual healthcare supply chain management process.” Hence, it’s natural that healthcare facilities are now turning toward the next piece of the modernization pie: tools for health revenue cycle management. Having learned from the tenuous process of EHR adoption, though, hospitals are looking for solutions that let them avoid repeating the same mistakes. We are finding that they are keen to find healthcare RCM tools that: • Integrate well with existing EHR solutions, ensuring the time and money spent on EHR implementation isn’t wasted. • Provide peace of mind about future functionality, especially as insurers move increasingly to value-based payment models. • Let providers avoid the issues they experienced when integrating EHRs. Adopt Effective Patient and Claims Management Tools A glaring problem with traditional hospital revenue cycle management software solutions is it treats it as a silo function. In some instances, patient reimbursement claims are an afterthought and denial management is a tool that stands on the side of everything else. Silos create manual processes and encourage insufficient forethought in admissions and treatment, which makes it even more difficult to collect from insurers later. This is why it’s important to use patient management platforms that integrate healthcare RCM concerns smoothly within front-end processes. For instance, our medical insurance verification and medical clearance management tools ensure appropriate information is harvested to support clean claims processes and effective denial management. Proactive approaches to revenue matters reduce amounts of denials organizations face to begin with — and the entire process is easy to use and integrate with existing tools. Use Retention Tools to Boost Quality and Value No matter how well healthcare organizations improve their efficiency and billing, it won’t mean much if they are unable to meet more stringent value-based payment requirements. The solution, of course, is to use patient retention tools that provide the future-proofing that providers are looking for in software solutions. Wellness and prevention reminders, medication adherence and discharge-management tools are essential to help providers support patients after treatment and reduce the likelihood of unnecessary readmissions. Patient care coordination solutions let providers synchronize patient contact and services across departments and collaborate with medical treatment teams to support high-quality care — all of which is required by most value-based payment programs. Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care. Contact us to begin discovering how we can guide your hospital towards positive outcomes and exceptional results.
Let’s Talk: Virtual Personal Assistants and Medical SEO Written by SQHealth-admin on June 6, 2017. Posted in Connect. “Hey, Siri!” “”Hey Alexa!” Even if you don’t use these commands to interact with virtual personal assistants like Apple’s Siri mobile app and Amazon’s Echo “smart speaker,” you likely have heard them on their respective TV commercials or have personally witnessed people uttering those and similar phrases into their “knowledge navigator” devices to get information. Although not yet a universal best practice for healthcare marketers—even for those actively involved with in hospital Website’s search engine optimization (SEO)—the continued adoption of intelligent personal assistant technologies ensure that medical SEO techniques will soon merge with personal assistant search optimization (PASO) as part of healthcare digital marketing strategy best practices. [poll id=”8″] A 2014 Google blog, “OMG! Mobile Voice Survey Reveals Teens Love to Talk,” noted 41 percent of adults rely on voice searches at least once per day—with more than half of all teens reportedly turning to personal digital assistants daily for help with locating information. Presumably, as smartphones (and the virtual personal assistant technologies they provide) have become even more commoditized, it’s a safe assumption that voice search rates have grown too. Another safe presumption is users will use increasingly rely upon virtual personal assistants for finding healthcare information. For instance, a person driving to work that suddenly remembers they haven’t had a physical in years might ask Siri about available physicians. Or, someone out with friends that experiences an injury might turn to Google Assistant to locate an urgent care facility. Or, a mother worried about her child at night might turn to the mobile device on the bedside table to ask about symptoms. But no matter who (or what) is doing the knowledge navigation, the location of that data remains the same: on the Internet. And thus, the advantages of search optimization also remain the same. Therefore, the time is now to start understanding how healthcare SEO and PASO can help healthcare organizations improve their online efforts for patient acquisition and patient engagement. Additional Advantages of Medical SEO for Virtual Personal Assistants So, there’s no doubt that implementing your existing medical SEO strategies for the new virtual personal assistant audience is an opportunity to find new patients (and for them to find you!). However, those that embrace this sooner than later will likely reap additional rewards. Here are a few reasons why: • Currently, virtual personal assistant search results tend only yield a few links—as compared to traditional Web-browser searches that can produce hundreds—if not thousands — of results. (For example Siri on average returns one to four links per search.) This indicates the current competition to preferred rankings is not very fierce, which naturally suggests it can be very easy to achieve top medical SEO rankings. • Intelligent personal assistant searches are often filtered through additional artificial intelligence technologies, which mean the results are more likely to be custom tailored to the user. As such, the opportunity to develop highly personalized results may likely result in impressive click-through rates. This is likely to become even more true as the technologies improve. • Because search engine algorithms are routinely adjusted to embrace new ways for users to find relevant information—not to mention the potential boosts in a hospital Website’s traffic and engagement— it’s entirely possible that early adopters of medical SEO for virtual personal assistants may see overall increases in their Website’s search engine result page rankings. Challenges of Healthcare SEO for Intelligent Personal Assistants • Keyword and result strategies: Unfortunately, healthcare SEO for intelligent personal assistants does not mean a simple transfer of keywords and calls to action. This is primarily due to the differences in how a browser-based search will return search results in comparison to a virtual personal assistant. The easiest way to describe this is the balance of quality versus quantity. Of course, all search engines strive to provide quality results, but virtual personal assistants will make additional pressure to provide a limited quantity. After all, a Web-browser user can quickly scan results on page, open multiple links, conduct another search, etc. the voice-based results from a virtual personal assistant will not have that luxury. For instance, if a user asks Siri where to find an ENT, preferred results will verbally provide one or two resources, rather than a recital of a full Internet scour. • Terminology and nomenclature: Most search engines are “smart” enough to detect misspellings and suggest appropriate searches. However, this may be a problem for the still-not-perfect accuracy of voice recognition when coupled with the demanding language requirements for some medical searches. • Voice inflections: Finally, medical providers must also keep up with the capabilities of current search technologies so they know how best to leverage it for patient engagement and assistance. As explained in an mHealth Intellgence article, “mHealth Takes a Closer Look at Digital Assistant,” there are concerns about the technology’s current inability to recognize emotional distress and respond accordingly. Consequently, patients might query with symptoms and be provided with completely irrelevant—and sometimes irreverent — responses, which could exacerbate emergencies. As Sequence Health’s Associate Director of Search Engine Marketing, Susan Gullion is one of our most knowledgeable resources for enhancing our healthcare clients’ search engine marketing strategies with SEO, PPC and social media. Please contact us to learn more about how Sequence Health can partner with you to develop a custom healthcare search engine marketing solution.
Beyond the Blog: Sequence Health Featured in Healthcare IT News Media Outlets Written by SQHealth-admin on June 2, 2017. Posted in Company Overview. Readers familiar with the Sequence Health blog know it covers a lot of territory that spans from healthcare marketing to bariatric surgery to value-based care and much more. However, our blog is only one way that we engage with our audience to share our expertise, perspectives and opinions about healthcare and hospital information technology and patient management solutions. The first months of 2017 saw us traveling around the country to attend several healthcare conferences and events that gave us the opportunity to make real-time and in-person connections. More recently, our travel schedule has been relatively quiet, but we were quite visible in healthcare IT news and other media outlets during the spring. For those that get value from the information shared in our blog, we think you might be interested in some of our other headlines and contributions! Chief Technology Officer Gopi Yeleswarapu Digs Deeper into Automated Texting and Patient Management & Outcomes with Digital Commerce 360 In March, Digital Commerce 360 published “Automated Texting Can Improve Patient Management and Outcomes” by our Chief Technology Officer Gopi Yeleswarapu. Gopi’s piece—which dug deeper into a blog we published earlier this year, “Using Automated Phone Calls and Texts to Improve Patient Outcomes, Hospital Brand Perceptions”—demonstrated automated texting’s proven ability to help patients have better experiences and elevate patient satisfaction rates. Health Data Management Spotlights Sequence’s Platform for Bariatric Patient Management at Fresno Heart and Surgery Center Our March media mentions continued in a Health Data Management article, “Platform Helps Bariatric Patients Stay on Track for Procedures,” which featured Fresno Heart and Surgery Center’s usage of our Sequence patient management platform for its bariatric patient management. We were also described as unique for “not only offering lead tracking of prospective clients, but additional services such as administering the website, hosting online seminars and conducting search engine optimization.” CEO John Richmond Tackles Reimbursement Maximizing CJR Reimbursements with Becker’s Hospital Review Last but certainly not least in March, our CEO John Richmond’s “4 Steps to Maximize Reimbursements Under Medicare’s CJR Initiative” was featured in Becker’s Hospital Review. Along with sharing his invaluable tips, John explained how they apply to “all hospitals, not just those performing joint replacement surgeries” and that as “one of Medicare’s initial forays into value-based reimbursement,” it is “expected to aggressively move additional programs to the model in the upcoming years.” Director of Marketing and Creative Kris Altiere Discusses Healthcare Website Optimization with the American Marketing Association In April, the American Marketing Association published “4 Essential Web Optimization Practices to Boost Health Care Conversions” by our Director of Marketing and Creative Kris Altiere. As Sequence Health’s creative architect and marketing guru—as well as the liaison between our sales, marketing and creative departments—Kris was well positioned to explain how “prospective patients are web-savvy consumers” and the techniques to “put your Website to work filtering for the best patients and drawing them to your hospital.” Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care. Contact us to begin discovering how we can guide your hospital towards positive outcomes and exceptional results.