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 Guideway Care 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. Guideway Care 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 Guideway Care to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
Easy Patient Engagement Tips for Women’s Health Clinics During National Breast Cancer Month, October 2017 Written by web_developers on October 3, 2017. Posted in Connect, Women's Health. If you are responsible for patient engagement or marketing at a women’s health clinic, there are two things that are probably true: 1. You spend a lot of time with finding creative ways to get your patients to schedule appointments for breast cancer screenings. 2. You are among the very last people that need be reminded October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM). Because NBCAM is among the most successful of the many national health awareness months, it may be reminding some of your women’s health patients to schedule breast cancer screenings—especially if it’s been awhile since they’ve had one. For your other patients that are not getting the NBCAM message, now is the ideal time to take advantage of some excellent resources to improve your women’s health patient engagement now and throughout the year! Get Free Content and Marketing Ideas from Breast Cancer Awareness Organizations NBCAM’s supported by multiple organizations is one of the reasons why it is so effective at creative awareness. Many offer free content and resources to easily integrate into your women’s health patient engagement and marketing strategies. Among them are: • American Cancer Society: The ACS offers some useful PDF downloads that provide statistics, information about causes, risks, prevention, detection, diagnosis and more. You can use this highly-qualified information to supplement other content you use to engage patients. • Susan G. Komen Foundation: The Foundation’s Tools & Resources page lists more than a dozen links to resources that give you serious food for thought. • National Breast Cancer Foundation: If your women’s health clinic has the financial capabilities, the NBCF National Mammography Program can partner with you to provide free mammograms and diagnostic breast care services to underserved women. This is an excellent public relations opportunity to create exposure for your clinic. • U.S. Department of Health & Human Services: The HHS’ Healthfinder.gov page for NBCAM serves up superb free content for your newsletter and social media feeds. [poll id=”16″] Use Social Media for Women’s Health Patient Engagement If you aren’t yet using some of the more popular social media technologies—such as Twitter and Facebook—to engage with your patients, let NBCAM be your introduction! As mentioned previously, Healthfinder.gov’s page for NBCAM gives you free content to use in Tweets. Another way to engage your women’s health patients (and to attract other followers to your social media accounts) is to share or retweet interesting content. Start with following Twitter accounts for the same organizations mentioned earlier: • @AmericanCancer (American Cancer Society) • @SusanGKomen (Susan G. Komen Foundation) • @NBCF (National Breast Cancer Foundation) • @healthfinder (HHS Healthfinder.gov) Finally, don’t forget the hashtags for both adding to your Tweets and to find other relevant content! • #nationalbreastcancerawareness • #nationalbreastcancerawarenessmonth As Guideway Care Central/Western Regional Director, Chris Stearns is not only one of our healthcare IT experts, but he also provides specialized focus on Orthopedic Surgery and Women’s Health. Guideway Care 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 Guideway Care 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 Guideway Care 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. Guideway Care 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 Guideway Care 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 Guideway Care 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. Guideway Care 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 Guideway Care to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
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 Guideway Care Director of Marketing and Creative. Guideway Care 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 Guideway Care to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
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 Guideway Care 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 Guideway Care can partner with you to develop a custom healthcare search engine marketing solution.
Healthcare SEO: Google Tips for May 2017 Written by SQHealth-admin on May 4, 2017. Posted in Connect. A Look at the Latest Google Tips That Affect SEO for Hospitals and Medical Practices We hope your hospital or medical practice is having a wonderful Spring! 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 Analytics Home and Google Data Studio If your healthcare SEO strategy only looks at Website performance metrics on a limited basis—perhaps because you don’t have time or because you find analytics to be tedious and difficult—Google has recently upgraded and expanded two of its analytics tools that may encourage or enable you to use data to improve your medical SEO. First, Google Analytics: Last month, Google published “The New Google Analytics Home: Know Your Data,” in which it announced a redesigned “Home” page intended to provide “an overview of key aspects of your business’ online presence.” Second, Google Data Studio: In March, Google published “Data Studio now globally available,” in which it announced unlimited reports (instead of the previous limit of five) for its new “beta” analytics tool. This innovative tool collects data from multiple sources (e.g., your Website, Facebook page, YouTube page) and lets the user create customizable dashboards for presentations or reports. The takeaway: It’s very easy to slip into “analysis paralysis” with Google Analytics—a testament to the depth and complexity of data it can provide. The simplified Google Analytics Home page’s simple dashboard may be a blessing for the aforementioned digital healthcare marketers that need quick and easy-to-digest information or for the more advanced medical SEO’er prone to unproductive analysis paralysis. Likewise, the continued development of Google Data Studio may also be a blessing for digital healthcare marketers in either the “inexperienced or too busy” or “experienced over-thinker” camps of healthcare SEO. This is particularly true in the age of healthcare content marketing and healthcare social media marketing, which, like a hospital Website’s SEO, can be improved with performance data analysis. New “How Google Search Works” Search Engine Roundtable.com recently published “Google Updates Their ‘How Search Works’ Site,” which links to a redesigned guide that may be of interest to anybody involved in SEO for hospitals, but particularly anybody new to healthcare SEO. The takeaway: It could be argued that knowing how Google search works is worth knowing just for the intellectual curiosity about one of the most important technologies ever created and that affects virtually everybody’s lives. But for the novice digital healthcare marketer that wants to improve their medical SEO acumen, there may be tremendous advantage to having a better understanding of how search engines (especially Google’s) work. Improved Granular Review in Google Local Listings Search Engine Roundtable.com also published “Google Adds More Granular Review Filtering In Local Listings” in which it explained that rather than “full star” ratings (e.g., four stars), Google now lets users filter with “half stars” (e.g., 4.5 stars). However, what made this article so compelling was what one reader wrote in the comments: “The main problem remains and that is that Google’s reviews are filled with fakes written either by marketers stuffing their client’s with raving reviews (or negatives for their competitors) or reviews written by the business owner themselves. This problem undermines the rating process as a whole and will only get worse before Google comes up with some sort of solution, if one exists…” The takeaway: Call it what you want—cheating, unethical, “black hat”—there will always be people that want to game the system. Here, it’s with fake reviews…and yes, it does undermine the rating process. However, it is arguable that the problem “will only get worse before Google comes up with some sort of solution.” The only certain “solution” would be to eliminate review filtering, which benefits nobody. Instead, a more appropriate suggestion would be to not engage in such practices to market your hospital online. Although there might be some short-term gains—especially if your hospital is in very competitive market and may rely upon comparatively higher ratings to attract new patients—eventually, the heightened expectations will result in negative reviews. As Guideway Care 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 Guideway Care can partner with you to develop a custom healthcare search engine marketing solution.
Getting Personal: Making the Most of Social Media in Healthcare with Facebook Bots and Facebook Live Written by SQHealth-admin on April 26, 2017. Posted in Connect. Recent developments in using social media for health are now enabling hospitals and clinics to make personal connections like never before, notable because social media—and Facebook in particular—has been routinely rejected by marketers from many sectors due to its impersonality. However, Facebook’s recent innovations are now providing capabilities that are perfect for healthcare marketing and communications, enabling hospital administrators and doctors to provide more personal levels of customer care. From profiling staff members to promoting services to distributing timely healthcare information, Facebook bots and Facebook Live are emerging as preferred social media healthcare marketing tools. And when used properly, they can significantly improve patient engagement outcomes. Here are some examples. Healthcare Marketing with Facebook Live Facebook Live enables healthcare marketers and staff to use video to interact with patients in real time. It is ideal for communicating the services and benefits that differentiate your healthcare facility from others. For instance, does your hospital or clinic have difficulty promoting or explaining: • Specialized medical equipment? • A unique focus on conditions and treatments? • Trendsetting procedures? Facebook Live can be used to put the spotlight on these sorts of features, allowing patients to better understand what sets your healthcare facility apart from another. With this type of information on hand, prospective patients will be better able to make appropriate care decisions while hopefully prioritizing your practice in particular. Scheduling Doctor Appointments with Facebook Bots Facebook bots are customizable programs that automate tasks. For example, scheduling doctor appointments no longer require a patient to call your staff and use valuable time to perform a relatively simple activity. Instead, Facebook bots can handle this task, letting patients send a simple message to get the ball rolling. This functionality has the added advantage of minimizing back office requirements, which streamlines your scheduling process without human assistance. Checking Medical Test Results with Facebook Bots There are many digital platforms that can now manage medical test results (like the popular MyChart phone app), so why not let Facebook be one more? When patients contact you via Facebook, a bot can provide access to results and medical data through a confidential portal. A fast and convenient alternative to paper results, this sort of system can offer a better substitute without the need for a follow-up appointment. This option can also be used to request copies of medical records, guiding patients to a records request process that can allow for a quick transfer of necessary documentation. Refiling Expired Prescriptions with Facebook Bots When a patient’s prescription is out of refills, he or she often ends up in a game of phone tag between the local pharmacy and his or her doctor’s office, desperately seeking a new script. A Facebook bot can simplify this process, automatically tapping into recordkeeping systems to let doctors know that their patients require assistance. A simple keyword system is all that is needed here; when patients provide a prescription number or other piece of contact information, bots can quickly and efficiently run interference to ensure consistent access to medication. Providing Healthcare Information with Facebook Bots When it comes to health information, many patients have more questions than answers. Oftentimes, seeking responses to queries means going to Google and doing general research with unreliable results, but chatbots can make this much easier and accurate. Instead of looking up information on the medical services you provide, customers can go to your Facebook page and get an automated response in seconds. Likewise, they can get answers about health information ranging from simple medical questions (like the definition and symptoms of a disease) to more complex treatment information. Considerations for Using Facebook Bots and Facebook Live • Privacy Issues and HIPAA Compliance: HIPAA is a critical issue in all areas of doctor-patient communications, and the legal protections surrounding confidential information are exceptionally serious. Medical practices implementing a chatbot system must be extremely careful to stay compliant under this law, ensuring that no access to personal data is directly available, or perhaps available at all without stringent verification of identity. • Emergency Services: As many healthcare professionals know, calling 911 is the best way to seek help in an emergency that requires medical care. Information to this end is usually available on hospital scheduling hotlines, Websites, social media pages and more, safeguarding providers against legal liability in the event that patients attempt to proceed with scheduling an appointment or seeking help online rather than calling emergency services. Any use of a chatbot will also need to take this information under consideration, implementing proper safety checks to ensure patients seeking immediate help are provided with the proper instructions. • Misinformation: Medical information provided by doctors is generally personalized to a particular patient’s needs, as not all advice can be applied universally. Information communicated through a chatbot will have to reflect these disclaimers as well, letting patients know clearly that any information made available is not specific and should not serve as a substitute for seeing a medical professional. As Guideway Care 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 Guideway Care can partner with you to develop a custom healthcare social media marketing solution.
HIPAA-Compliant Texting a Convenient, Efficient Way to Improve Patient Management and Outcomes Written by web_developers on April 12, 2017. Posted in Connect. Last month, we published a blog, “Using Automated Phone Calls and Texts to Improve Patient Outcomes, Hospital Brand Perceptions” that examined some advantages how telephones—including mobile phones and smartphones—can enhance patient management and communications. We also demonstrated the importance of using mobile device communications to engage with patients—in particular, via text messaging—after sharing research that stated approximately two-thirds of American adults own a smartphone, with 62 percent of them having used the device to get information about a health condition. As with so many other matters that relate to patient information, privacy—especially with respect to HIPAA compliance—is of supreme importance. Therefore, to fully appreciate the advantages of using text messages to communicate with patients, it’s crucial that patient text messages are HIPAA compliant. Ensuring HIPAA-Compliant Text Messages Ensuring that text messages comply with HIPAA privacy laws is fairly simple: You are essentially in compliance if your messages don’t include any information that identifies the patient (including his/her conditions or treatments). For example, you may send text-message appointment reminders and confirmations, but only if you don’t include the patient’s name, birth date or any similar information. It’s important to note text messages don’t need to be entirely stripped of practical healthcare information to be HIPAA-compliant. For instance, text messages that encourage patients to remain an active participant in their healthcare fit within this concept—so long as they don’t recommend specific tests for the patient or explicitly indicate the patient has a specific condition. Advantages of HIPAA-Compliant Text Messaging with Patients • More Convenient for Patients Many people who have a smartphone use it as more of a mobile office than as a mobile telephone. In some cases, they don’t even answer the phone. Instead, they prefer to use text messaging, e-mail and other messaging platforms. By communication through channels that patients may find more convenient, you might find that you’ll have more success contacting them via text than you might through phone calls. • Increase Engagement with Patients Smartphone users interact with their devices an estimated 2,617 times per day—which includes the times they check for messages, social media and missed phone calls. With such a high volume of daily interactions, HIPAA-compliant texting can help healthcare providers increase engagement with patients—but without having to place time-consuming phone calls that might just go to voicemail. • Improves Outcomes Research is routinely finding that text messages can improve patient outcomes. For instance (and as I recently mentioned in an article published by Digital Commerce 360.com, “Automated Texting Can Improve Patient Management and Outcomes”), a study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research noted patients who received text messages as part of a study related to Type 2 diabetes had improved outcomes. • Optimizes Staff Resources Using platform-as-a-service (PaaS) patient management solutions that can send automated messages may free up your staff members’ time that would have otherwise been spent making phone calls to patients. This enables them to more quickly answer inbound calls from patients, which can result in a more productive and positive experience for patients. Gopi Yeleswarapu is Guideway Care Chief Technology Officer. Guideway Care is a recognized leader for innovative patient engagement solutions—which includes its Platform as a Service (PaaS), Sequence. To learn more about how Sequence can help you take advantage of HIPAA-compliant texting and other automated patient engagement solutions, please contact us.
Using Automated Phone Calls and Texts to Improve Patient Outcomes, Hospital Brand Perceptions Written by web_developers on March 3, 2017. Posted in Connect. The thought of using any type of automated phone system for communicating with patients—including text messages—might not initially seem to a be productive one. After all, how many times have you received a “robocall” or an unsolicited text that proved to be nothing more than a nuisance? In that context, why would you want to jeopardize your hospital’s brand with perceptions of being a nuisance? However, those conclusions might not necessarily be valid. Studies about automated healthcare phone calls and texts are suggesting thited a report that indicated how a “health system [that] had previously been close to the bottom of the national average for colorectal screening “used automated phone calls” to get 578 patients to schedule colon cancer screenings, which led to the diagnosis of pre-cancerous polyps in an estimated 145 patients.” contrary—particularly in the ability for them to boost patient outcomes and engagement and to improve brand perceptions. Automated Phone Messages: The Colon Cancer Screening Study There are some outstanding examples of how automated phone messages have proven their potential. FierceHealthcare.com’s “Automated Phone Notifications Engage Patients, Boost Follow-Up Care” cited a report that indicated how a “health system [that] had previously been close to the bottom of the national average for colorectal screening “used automated phone calls” to get 578 patients to schedule colon cancer screenings, which led to the diagnosis of pre-cancerous polyps in an estimated 145 patients.” Some simple math shows 25 percent of those patients were diagnosed…an impressive rate indeed! Automated Text Messages: The Heart Disease Study Of course, any discussion about modern phone communications implies the usage of mobile devices and smartphones—which further implies the usage of SMS text messaging. According to Pew Research’s “6 Facts About Americans and Their Smartphones,” approximately two-thirds of American adults own a smartphone, with 62 percent of them having used the device to get information about a health condition. With most of the population using a technology that has a positive relationship with personal health management, it would seem reasonable to suggest that automated text messages could be a key to improving patient outcomes, like automated phone messages. Once again, studies are confirming this presumption. In 2015, the JAMA Network published clinical trial results, “Effect of Lifestyle-Focused Text Messaging on Risk Factor Modification in Patients With Coronary Heart Disease“, in which half of the 700 participating heart disease patients were sent text messages either two or four times a week for a six-month period. The report concluded: “Among patients with CHD, the use of a lifestyle-focused text messaging service compared with usual care resulted in a modest improvement in LDL-C level and moderate improvements in blood pressure, BMI, and smoking status.” Improving Hospital and Clinic Brand Perceptions Earlier it was suggested that automated phone calls and texts could be perceived as a nuisance—even if they are in fact effective at improving communications with patients. Yet, research is deflecting the negative implications. For instance, MedicalEconomics.com’s “Staying Connected to Patients Beyond the Office Visit” mentioned a study that said: “66% of Americans have received a voicemail, text or email from their healthcare provider, with half of those who received a communication saying it made them feel more valued, a third saying the digital communication improved their opinion of the provider and a third saying it made them feel more likely to visit the provider again.” How to Use Automated Phone Calls and Texts to Improve Patient Management and Outcomes If your hospital or clinic uses a patient appointment management platform, it’s possible that you already have the tools needed to immediately use automated phone calls and text messages to better engage with and manage your patients. However, automated communications are useful for many other objectives, including alerts and reminders for: • Prescription refills • Drug recall • Monitoring • Preventative care The advantages of improving patient outcomes not only exceed the primary goal of every healthcare provider to help patients enjoy healthier and happier lives, but as we’ve discussed in blogs such as “BPCI Initiative Year 2 Lessons Learned,” they are increasingly related to Medicare reimbursements. Guideway Care is a recognized leader for innovative patient management solutions, which includes our Sequence patient management PaaS (platform as a service). To learn about how Guideway Care can help your improve your patient outcomes and engagement, please contact us.