Advantages of CMS Physician Websites for Community Hospitals
October 11, 2011
Content management system (CMS) websites offer your physicians the ideal solution for a branded website with the added ability to manage the site’s content.
What is a CMS? A content management system uses software and a database to manage and organize website content. Sites may be developed from scratch or built from a variety of available templates and then customized. The greatest benefit is the software’s user-friendly interface, which allows content to be easily added and edited without learning HTML or other coding languages.
Why should you use a CMS?
- No technical expertise is required. Individuals with average knowledge of word processing can add content, videos, photos, pages and links directly into the professionally designed CMS template.
- It is ideal for a collaborative environment. Users may simultaneously add or edit content simply by logging in to the “backend” of the website, where the content is stored. A CMS is optimal for a hospital or large practice where multiple people will be assisting in the upload of content.
- Better ranking on SEO. Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the process of improving your site’s visibility on the web by optimizing it for search engines. Most CMS have plugins or features to assist with SEO. Updating your site frequently with relevant content will also make it more visible to search engines.
- You can make changes immediately. You can effortlessly update your site with no delay. The moment you publish content to your CMS, it appears on your live website. Keep the community up-to-date on your practice’s awards, press releases, classes, announcements and media content.
- It will save lots of money. A well-designed CMS practice website template can help hospital marketers maintain branding by making it easy to share the template design with affiliated practices, creating a cohesive look. This lowers costs, as modifications can be made without the need of outside vendors or web experts.
- Security. The site administrator can manage what content is editable by other users or approved “authors.” This provides your content more protection from many standard website attacks.
- Social media integration – Your website can be easily linked to social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook, which allows practices to reach a broader audience of patients.
When you use an agency to set up and design your CMS template, you benefit by producing and establishing a branded look for your web presence, which can then be applied to affiliated practices. You will save time and money with the ability to easily add and edit your own content.
Examples of sites created using a CMS:
- Ovarian Cancer National Alliance – This organized and content-rich site was built using WordPress as a CMS. Check out this article on using WordPress to build your hospital website.
- Let’s Get Healthy For You! – This fun and clean design was also done using WordPress as a CMS.
- Baron Therapy – This creative and informative therapy services site was built using Joomla! as a CMS.
- Spine Health – Another content-heavy site, this one was built using Drupal as a CMS.
Practice Website Benefits for Community Hospitals
October 11, 2011
Physician practice websites will increase your community hospital practice’s visibility, build its reputation in the community and give your marketing budget the most value for every dollar spent.
The Internet is an absolutely essential tool for physician practices. I am amazed at how many rural practices that I talk to who have virtually no web presence.
Online Healthcare Empowers Consumers. Your practices need websites to acquire patients in an increasingly tech-savvy world.
In order to build a bridge between healthcare providers and patients, a website must also project the right image to your target audience. The appearance of the practice website and the information it presents greatly impact your visitors’ first impressions of your services. Their initial perceptions are completely in your control. How do you want your practice to be seen to the public? As reliable, modern and informed? As friendly, warm and welcoming? Build your site to reflect your practice.
As healthcare marketers, we talk a lot about mobile and social media campaigns, QR codes and email communication. None of these are effective if we have no coherent destination or website to which we can direct patients.
Developing your practice website is the first and most effective form of communication today!
Essential website content:
- A short description of your practice and specialties
- Physician biographies and certifications
- Personalized facilities and staff photos
- Explanations of procedures and services
- Before-and-after case studies showcasing your skills
- Hospital affiliations
- Office hours, office policies and accepted insurance plans
- Directions and maps to the practice
- Patient education articles
Getting ahead of the competition:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Social media integration
- EMR patient portal
- Physician videos
- Electronic patient forms
- Interactive maps and driving directions
- Patient education videos
Successful Practice Websites:
- Desert Institute for Spine Care – Physician videos, Patient education videos, Patient forms
- Cardiovascular Longevity’s MyEliteHealth – Patient Portal Integration, Patient forms
- Dr. Cooper-Lall – A dentist who understands the power of social media
As a mom and healthcare shopper, I take charge of my family’s health. Healthcare consumers go online for an increasing variety of healthcare information including looking for their doctors.
A website for your practice is more than just a way to “keep up” with your competition – it’s a way to get ahead.
Your repertoire among local physicians greatly dictates your community hospital’s ability to gather a client base. Learn how to tailor your services and marketing campaign to increase your physician referrals.
It may be helpful to dedicate one individual to act as the face of your community hospital when reaching out to other physician practices. A personal relationship is the key to successfully obtaining physician referrals, because physicians will refer to a practice that they trust and respect.
Build A Network
- Assess the physician practices and primary care doctors in your area. Reach out by sending a letter of introduction or inviting the physicians to visit your hospital or attend a seminar.
- Involve your own physicians. Their interest and involvement is crucial to developing a referral strategy. They may have insights into local physicians and practices with whom you can connect.
- Cultivate relationships with existing referrals and potential referrals using the following techniques:
Cost-Effective Marketing
- Establish a presence on the web: Keep your website up-to-date with information for both referring physicians and patients. Ensure your web content is compatible with mobile devices, as recent studies have shown that 80 to 90 percent of doctors have a smartphone.
- Utilize social media: Use sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to keep in frequent contact with patients and physicians. Use “tweets” and “status updates” as a way to briefly but frequently touch base with other physicians. Show your physicians to be both personable with patients and knowledgeable about medicine.
- Email marketing: Send out business-to-business emails systematically and share the latest news about your programs and services.
- Advertising in physician-only networking sites: Register with a physician-only networking site such as Sermo (largest MD-only online community), iMEdExchange or Ozmosis.
- On-site/in-person marketing: Just because almost everything is moving online does not mean you have to abandon traditional marketing techniques. When time permits, have a representative visit local practices and spread the word and reputation of your hospital.
Provide Optimal Customer Service
This post from Rx MD Marketing Solutions suggests how to “make it easy to work with you and your office”:
- Report back quickly to the referring physicians about their patients. Do all that you can to assist them with paperwork or prescriptions related to their patient.
- Refer back to the physicians who have referred you. If you see a patient who needs a primary care doctor or a specialist service that you don’t offer, refer him to a local practice that has referred you.
- Demonstrate good customer service by treating the referring offices with respect. Be prompt with their calls and requests, and consider sending a thank-you note to the physicians who have recommended you.
Providing basic social media guidelines for your community hospital’s physicians will help them feel more at ease about diving into social media — allowing your hospital to take advantage of all its brand building benefits.
As a healthcare marketer, you understand that your community hospital’s participation on social networking sites has become a necessity and is a crucial component of your hospital’s overall marketing plan, but you may still be facing resistance from your physicians when it comes to social media.
Physicians may be uncomfortable using social media due to the lack of professional guidelines that clearly define and protect the physician-patient relationship online.
How can your marketing department guide your physicians in their social media practices to prevent losing out on valuable patient connections and brand building opportunities that social media provides?
American Medical News recently published an article on the ethical unknowns physicians face when using social networking sites. It provides 4 great tips you can use to help your physicians avoid ethical dilemmas on social media:
- Keep your personal profile only for friends, family and colleagues. Create a separate business page to share general health information with your patients.
- Do not respond to personal medical questions. If the question comes from your patient, handle it through an office visit, phone consultation or encrypted e-mail exchange.
- Never post any identifying information about your patients–it’s unethical and illegal.
- Blogging or Tweeting anonymously is not recommended. Anonymity can make it easier for doctors to post content that is disrespectful to patients or that undermines patient trust in the profession.
The American College of Physicians’ Center for Ethics and Professionalism is working to formulate social media policy to include a revised ethics manual. Chair of the organization’s Council of Associates, Erin Dunnigan, MD, believes that physicians’ interactions with patients online should be held to the same standard as face-to-face physician-patient interactions.
“We have long accepted that there is a code of conduct that governs physician-patient interactions in a face-to-face setting, and online interactions are no different,” says Dr. Dunnigan. “Physicians need to treat these communications with the same level of sensitivity and set boundaries where appropriate, so as to preserve the inherent trust of the doctor-patient relationship.”
Social media is still a new and ever-changing medium for communication and is widely used for both professional and personal purposes. Marketing can help physicians establish clear guidelines when connecting with patients online, which will calm fears and increase participation.
To read the American Medical News article in full, click on the title, “Social Media Pose Ethical Unknowns for Doctors”.
Community Hospital Marketing: 4 Hospitals that Know How to Market their Physicians Well
August 31, 2010
Marketing their physicians is, arguably, the most important thing hospitals can do to increase volume and market share. Doing it well can help you to stand out from your competition.
Community hospital physicians and leaders have a profound personal connection to the health of their community that can’t be replicated. With a marketing plan of delivering physicians that are neighbors caring for neighbors, your hospital can market better than its competition, a caring community hospital experience.
Patients desire to have a personal connection with their doctor. Doctors are busy and finding the time to personally connect with patients is not always possible. Start to build a trusting patient/physician relationship through your website, blog, Facebook and you tube account by allowing physicians to communicate and share personal stories.
Here are 4 examples of hospitals that do a great job marketing their physicians:
Nyak Hospital
With a simple click on the Nyak Hopsital website home page, visitors have the chance to see photos and read first-person stories of doctors with a variety of interests. The testimonial-style ads aim to communicate the physicians’ passion for what they do and share successful patient experiences.
Temple University Hospital
Their website offers robust content, including streaming videos featuring doctors in action. The marketing department stated, “In terms of strategic approach, the Internet was viewed as a provider selection channel, not just a communications channel.”
Temple’s new website was developed to emphasize program and physician capabilities, and facilitate online appointment requests. Email appointment requests jumped 20% with no additional marketing. After only 9 months they had the highest volume of web-based appointment requests in the hospital’s history.
Southern Regional Health System
Southern Regional Health System launched “Healthbreak,” a TV campaign featuring 90-second videos of Southern Regional physicians. These video spots are a sponsored educational health news piece with the local news station featuring Southern Regional’s physicians.
“The genesis of the campaign was to really figure out a way to feature our physicians in a prominent way—not only to their peers but to the community,” says Marcus Gordon, strategic marketing manager at SRHS. The spots are supported by its YouTube channel, which has more than 1,500 channel views. Since the campaign launched, call center traffic is up 55% from last year, and site visitors and unique visitors for the web site have each increased about 50%.
Alegent Health
A live web chat with local doctors, “Ask a Doc” creates a two-way conversation allowing patients to ask their questions of Alegent doctors from the comfort of their own home. But the assistance didn’t stop with a few answers. Alegent Health physicians also schedule next-day appointments on the spot. Alegent Health featured these live chat opportunities on Facebook and their website.
We sometimes forget that they are also real people with outside interests, and shared health concerns making house calls for busy physicians are a thing of the past. But creating social communities to leverage physician engagement can allow both physicians and patients to build relationships more efficiently.
Helping patients connect with your physicians will build a medical community of satisfied physicians and committed patients.
How does your organization help doctors connect and share their personal stories with patients?
10 Tips for Boosting Physician Referrals for Community Hospitals
August 27, 2010
To build patient volume, you need a successful physician sales strategy that builds relationships and boosts referrals.
In today’s competitive healthcare market, maintaining and increasing physician referrals is the lifeblood of your community hospital. Many hospitals focus on building relationships with their physicians through liaison activities, but could your hospital benefit from taking a stronger sales approach with your physicians?
I know what you are thinking, sales…really? The term “sales” isn’t our favorite word, but that is exactly what we are doing to consumers with every ad we place, tv spot we run and web page we build. Hospitals provide services instead of products, but they must sell their services to prosper like any other business.
In a recent article, Michael Krivicich, Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives, shared these 10 Tips to Boost Physician Referrals:
- Use a common sales strategy across the board. Leaving people to their own methods can result in incorrect messaging and using poorly designed materials, which could have some significant legal repercussions for your organization. Your activities are about relationship selling and acting as the liaison for the physician to your organization. If you don’t have a method and training, chances are you will not be as effective as your competition.
- Use a database system to collect information and track your physician interactions.
- Create an interdisciplinary marketing and sales advisory committee to build better relationships and improve communications.
- Train your marketing department in the sale approach that your sales people are using.
- Let your marketing team go on sales calls and include them in major presentations to provide new insights and perspectives.
- No more than 10 slides per presentation. Cut out the fluff and focus exactly on what you need for physicians to take away from your presentation.
- Have your marketing department review materials the sales departments have created.
- Combine marketing and sales meetings.
- Establish joint marketing and sales goals.
- Constantly evaluate and revise.
Hospitals depend on physician referrals to thrive and grow, and this is increasingly important in today’s environment. The physician is your customer, and selling them on your hospital’s services is key. Think about these rules of thumb to help increase your referrals.
Read Michael Krivicich’s entire article, “Selling to Physicians Through Integrated Marketing and Sales”
Top 30 Resource Blogs for the Community Hospital Marketer
August 20, 2010
These 30 blogs will provide insights from CEO’s, physicians, overall hospital communication, patients and marketers. Even though all of the blogs speak on healthcare issues, it is important to study how each group’s unique views help as you communicate to your diverse patient audience.
As a marketer, your goal is to communicate for your hospital its new and value-added services to your diverse patient audience. Blogs are a great way to stay on top of new communication practices and resource from a wide audience base. Blogs allow you to read information from a targeted audience which makes your research as a marketer more relevant.
The Top 30 Community Hospital Resource Blogs
- Mayo Clinic: One of the top two hospital blogs in the country.
- Johns Hopkins: One of the top two hospital blogs in the country.
- Lexington Medical Center: This is the official hospital blog for the Lexington Medical Center, located in Lexington, South Carolina.
- Science Life: A guide to the changing world of biomedicine, as seen from the perspective of writers at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Pediatric Hospital Blogs
- Children’s Hospital and Health System: This blog belongs to Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, which serves Wisconsin, Northern Illinois and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and beyond with information about the health system and news about children’s health.
- Riley Children’s Hospital
- Thrive: Children’s Hospital Boston blog is devoted to all things pediatric, healthcare and scientific research. They help consumers and reporters touch base with some of the world’s foremost experts on topics from sleep problems to autism genetics.
Physician Blogs
- KevinMD: Kevin Pho, a primary care doctor board-certified in Internal Medicine, writes a blog that Wall St. Journal states is “punchy, prolific…that chronicles America’s often dysfunctional health care system…”
- Roper on Health: This blog is offered by William L. Roper, MD, MPH CEO, University of North Carolina Health Care System. He focuses on health policy, science and news.
- Notes of an Anesthesioboist: This doctor focuses on the literary aspects of medicine and hospital care and has won an award for her efforts.
Hospital CEO Blogs
- Social Hospital: Social Hospital was founded by a hospital CFO who sees tremendous value in the usage of social media tools to build relationships with the communities that hospitals serve.
- More Than Medicine: Tom Quin, President & CEO of Community General Hospital in Syracuse, New York, provides his insights into hospital progress, philosophies and news.
- Running a Hospital: Possibly one of the most popular and candid hospital CEO blogs. Mr. Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, is forthright in his outlook and covers many issues that could pertain to any hospital.
- St. Joseph Medical Center: Scott Kashman is ex-officio CEO for St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Maryland. He talks about hospital news, and takes an upbeat philosophy to encourage personnel as well as other readers.
- Nick Jacobs: Formerly “Ask a Hospital President,” Jacobs has stepped down, written the book, Taking the Hell Out of Healthcare, and re-focused his blog to look at health policies.
Patient Blogs
- Patient Power: Andrew Schorr, leukemia survivor and patient advocate, keeps a focus on patient care with his blog.
- Dr. David’s Blog: Focus is on childhood cancer, written by a pediatric oncologist.
- My Overweight Child: Looks at childhood obesity and what you can do to help your child get healthier.
- Kids Health Pediatrics: This site provides child-friendly information on health and wellness.
Professional Networking for Hospital Marketing Blogs
- Healthcare Marketing: Articles and examples of passionate healthcare marketing by Don Dunlop.
- Hospital Marketing Education: A great blog if you like to watch videos as you research hospital marketing tips.
- Health Care and Hospital Communicators on myragan.com: The Health Care and Hospital Communicators section allows members to interact through bulletin boards and other features. They also provide communication-related publications and seminar information.
Hospital Marketing Blogs and Podcasts
- Marketshare: A marketing blog from HealthLeaders Media.
- Unsolicited Marketing Advice: A wide range of tools and tips of interest to the marketing or public relations manager. It has a special, but not exclusive, emphasis on healthcare.
- Weekly Probe: This blog is completely different. Deep, humorous insights into healthcare marketing.
- Healthy Conversations: A healthcare branding blog.
- Interval: Chris Bevolo.
- ND&P: Neathawk Dubuque & Packett.
- The Marketing Edge Blog & Podcast Albert Maruggi of Provident Partners. Covers healthcare, social media and other general new media topics.
- Hospital Impact: This blog is dedicated to providing information for current and emerging hospital leaders, thinkers and enablers. The blog’s mission is to answer the question, “What will it take for hospitals to be the best run organizations on the face of the planet?”
Blogs inspire, feed conversation and give valuable insights – QUICKLY. When the ever-evolving world of multi-channel marketing and the Web changes daily, these blogs provide up-to-date technology advancements, newly released advertising campaigns and valuable insight on your target audiences.
Do you have a blog that inspires you?
Social media marketing can be used as major communication tool for your hospital.
Are you like most healthcare marketers who are quickly trying to get on board with a social media plan for your community hospital? Well, you are not alone. A study by Greystone.net found only one in three current hospitals or health systems has a formal social media plan in place.
I had the benefit to attending the “SCHA’s one-day social media workshop” where Ed Bennett, a social media guru spoke. Ed has been following social media data for years, and he shared some amazing statistics on social media users that had us all singing the praises of social media marketing. He said that in the past year the mega social website, Facebook, a relative newcomer to the scene has surpassed Google in website visits. At the same time there has been a 10% decrease in non-social media web traffic as people spend more time on social media sites.
Tony Chin, principal of Launch Your Movement, wrote a fantastic article on hospital success stories.
10 Hospital Social Media Success Stories
Proactive Outreach
1. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CEO Paul Levy blogs to run a better hospital.
2. Geisinger uses Twitter/Facebook to recruit gastroenterologists.
3. Lifespan reaches out to patients and family personally through Twitter.
4. Ob/gyn practice patient-to-patient interaction success using Twitter and Facebook. (PDF)
Concierge Services
5. Scripps uses Twitter to turn angry patients into loyal ones.
6. Norman Regional Health System spends 30 minutes a day on Twitter and Facebook.
Live Event Coverage
7. Children’s Medical Center in Dallas tweeted about a kidney transplant from a father to his son.
8. Twitter during live surgery.
- St. Luke’s in Cedar Rapids
- UNC Hospitals
- Henry Ford
- Sherman Hospital
- OSF St Joseph
- Sinai Hospital in Baltimore
- Methodist University Hospital in Memphis
9. South Coast Health System uses Twitter for real-time crisis communication.
10. St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital
If you weren’t a believer in how social media can inspire, educate, recruit and create loyal ambassadors for your brand, you will soon be singing the social media jingle too! For more details, be sure to check out his article, “10 Hospital Social Media Success Stories”
Do you have a social media success story? If so, please share it in the comment section below.
