Challenging times

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

While many healthcare organizations have regular opportunities to exercise their crisis communication plans, few of us have had a need to focus those plans on financial challenges, until recently.  As organization after organization announces hiring freezes, layoffs, construction suspensions and related economic woes, it’s time to look at how well we’re addressing these challenges from a communications perspective and examine how the Internet in all its many forms creates new opportunities and challenges for embattled Marcom departments.

Join us on Thursday, April 30 at 2:00 CST for a free educational Webinar event: Use the Web to Communicate During Times of Change and Challenge.  We’ll explore the unique communications challenges faced during economic events and evaluate how new tools can be used to make you more effective and efficient in getting your message heard.

DevConnections Spring 2009 – A Smashing Success

By John Oberreuter, SQL Developer

A few weeks ago, I attended DevConnections Conference and was particularly interested in learning about SQL Server.  Last August Microsoft launched SQL Server 2008 and, to no surprise, SQL Server 2008 was the main focus of many of the sessions. These sessions covered a wide range of topics including Business Intelligence, performance tuning and database maintenance.

Pleasant Time

By Andy To, Application Developer

Having fun while working … what more can one ask for? That is the case for six developers from Geonetric, myself included. We were given an opportunity to attend the DevConnections Conference in Orlando during the midst of an economic downturn. This just proves Geonetric is willing to invest in its employees and continues to strive for excellence.

The Impact of the Content Timeline on the Launch of a Web Site

 By Jill Ungs, Senior Project Manager

When I started at Geonetric, a very wise project manager told me that no matter how hard they try, clients always underestimate the amount of work required to write and place content on a brand new Web site. 

I took these words of wisdom into consideration when I oversaw my first project launch at Geonetric, and I still remain cognizant of them many project launches later. While my batting average is improving, it’s still not 100 percent.  Every launch teaches me new tricks and illustrates different obstacles that need to be overcome.

Where Does WebMD Fit In? A Free Webcast.

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

WebMD is the single most trafficked Web site dedicated to health-related issues, boasting some 54 million unique visitors monthly and yet few provider organizations consider it as a part of their online strategy.

On Wednesday, I’m co-presenting a Webinar with Cynthia Newton of HCCG and Brian Bierbaum of Priority entitled Optimizing WebMD to Reach Your Target Audience.  We’ll look at what WebMD brings to the table and the various opportunities to utilize this destination site in your overall plan. 

A Look into Providing Business Intelligence

By Jason Adams, Senior SQL Developer

I recently attended the Microsoft’s DevConnections Conference.  As a database developer, my focus was on sessions dealing with the business intelligence and data warehousing technologies that ship with Microsoft SQL Server.

The concepts of data warehousing is something I have been researching for the past year; I believe it’s a concept that can assist organizations in making better decisions about their business. The sessions I attended covered all of Microsoft’s data warehousing tools  - from tools that help you develop a data warehouse to tools that help deliver business intelligence to key decision makers.

There were a few sessions that stuck with me the most.  The first two – “Why Data Warehousing Projects Fail” and “Avoiding Common Analysis Services Mistakes” – provided guidelines on how to design a data warehouse solution and avoid common mistakes.  The other session focused on delivering business intelligence to the end user and addressed how to create a digital dashboard with the reporting tools that are a part of Microsoft SQL Server.

Safeway – Successfully Influencing Health Consumer Behavior

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

We’ve had an active discussion going about how to motivate consumers to make good decisions about their health when managing their health or chronic disease. So when I heard that Safeway has managed to freeze the growth of their healthcare spending over the past four years through the implementation of a corporate wellness program, I couldn’t wait to see how they accomplished this.

Safeway is a large retail grocery chain with roughly 200,000 employees. They are self insured, spending approximately $1 billion per year on healthcare.

As a self insured employer, Safeway had the flexibility to design their own benefits plan and they did so following a set of understandings (I’ll post more specifics from the presentation by Steven Burd, Chairman and CEO of Safeway, at the World Health Care Congress. if I’m able to get his slides).

Sweet Validation

By Scott Youngblut, Application Developer

When developers are tasked with a difficult project, there are many resources to turn to; books and Google are the most widely used.  But what happens if those fail to provide the needed direction and guidance?  Many times you set down a path using your best judgment and hope everything works out in the end.

The recent DevConnections Conference, which I along with five of Geonetric’s developers attended, validated many of my feelings. During sessions on the first day, it became very clear to me that we have found the correct solutions to many complex problems that others struggle with.

The Difference Between Vision and Strategy in Healthcare Reform

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

In our business, the greatest risks and opportunities that we experience are due to the major changes in the industry we serve: healthcare. It’s with this in mind that I’m attending the World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C. this week.

Personally, I’ve been surprised at how aggressively the Obama administration has proceeded with a dialogue on healthcare reform. I truly believed this topic was too politically charged to deal with so early in the term. Clearly I was wrong.

The opening panel this morning examined the issue of achieving universal health coverage from three perspectives: the new administration, the California experiment that has failed to pass and the Massachusetts framework that is now providing coverage for nearly 98 percent of its residents.

Can You Pitch PR By Email?

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

There have been some interesting articles about how bloggers are frustrated with clumsy story pitches that they receive via email (typically blast spam email).  A discussion was instigated by blogger-icon Robert Scoble in an interview in the Hobson & Holtz report.  Scoble rants:

“The way pr is practiced is just lame. Why anyone pitches you on email is stupid, chances of listening are one percent.”

His comments have bothered some bloggers and lead to some indigestion about both the ethics and the effectiveness of various PR pitches.