Could Healthcare Assemble a Twelpforce?

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

Customer service in healthcare is challenging.  The difficulty comes from hospitals in general being a complex system.  There are a lot of disconnected entities that need to work together in order to get something accomplished.  But when there are problems, it’s often tough to determine where the actual issue is hiding, let alone find someone who can sort it out and make it right.

Look at a typical surgery, for example.  In addition to the surgeons, who are likely not employed by the hospital at which the surgery is performed, you have nurses (who are employed by the hospital), anesthesiologists (who aren’t) and during recovery, you may be monitored by a hospitalist (who is).  Add to that the surgical suite itself, ambulance company (if used), and let’s not forget your insurance company… yeah, it’s getting a little crowded. 

So when you get a stack of unintelligible bills, none of which quite align with the others, where do you even begin?

Give Your Web Site a Social Life!

By Casey Hansen, Front-end Developer

It is no secret that Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter are changing the way we communicate online. Rather than relying on email, we now spend time finding friends on Facebook and typing message we can squeeze into 140 characters on Twitter. Communications are changing, which opens up a new set of avenues for you to reach your visitors.

Integrating social media into your Web site’s design is an integral part of making the delicate dance of site visitor relations work. If you want people to respect your Facebook page, for example, it needs to fit with your overall Web presence. There are several ways you can help people  get involved with your social media efforts and many of them are related to your Web site design. Let’s take a look…

Observations from the HIMSS e-Health SIG Panel Discussion on Health 2.0

At HIMSS, I had the opportunity to co-host a panel discussion on Health 2.0 as a co-chair of the e-Health Special Interest Group. We were blessed with an incredible panel:

• Khaled Hassounah, MedHelp (http://www.medhelp.org/)
• Matthew Holt, (http://www.health2con.com/) and (http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/)
• Julie Murchinson, (http://www.health2accelerator.org) and
• Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, THINK-Health (http://www.think-health.com/)

And an incredible group of attendees, leading to some truly fascinating discussion. What follows is a short summary of what I heard in that discussion.

What is an Empowered Health Consumer, Anyway?

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

So much of what is done in the eHealth space has a fuzzy value proposition attached to it. One of the recurring themes that I hear for healthcare providers and many healthcare vendors is that they are trying to empower health consumers (or patients). It’s a theme that’s receiving attention from a great many sources – the government, insurers and employers.

PHR Webinar Hosted By The HIMSS eHealth SIG

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

I recently had the pleasure of seeing a demonstration of Google Health at a meeting that I was attending. Aside from some issues with the demonstration of connecting the account to a PHR at Beth Israel Deaconess (live demos are dangerous!), I was impressed at the progress that Google has made with their platform.

PHRs – Interest but no action

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

The ideas are almost there…almost. We can just about taste it, but refuse to take a bite.

I’m talking about online Personal Health Records (PHRs). A new report from Manhattan Research quantifies what we’ve suspected – there is a huge gap between interest and adoption.

How big? 90 percent. 63 million people.

A Strategy Framework for eHealth: Flow-through to ROI

By Eric Engelmann, President & CEO, and Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

We’ve now covered three stages of Geonetric’s strategy framework for eHealth: The eHealth Maturity Model. Today, we move forward to Level 4: Flow-through to ROI (return on investment). This level focuses on the financial impact that eHealth initiatives can bring to the table, translating the Level 3 outcomes into financial form.

Before we begin, let’s quickly review the first three levels of the model.

The eHealth Maturity Model Levels 1-3

The eHealth Maturity model includes five steps:

A Strategy Framework for eHealth: Desired Change in Outcomes that Matter to our Core Business

By Eric Engelmann, President & CEO, and Ben Dillon, Vice President, & eHealth Evangelist

Over the past several weeks, we’ve outlined the first two stages of Geonetric’s strategy framework for eHealth: The eHealth Maturity Model.

A Strategy Framework for eHealth: Measuring Satisfaction

By Eric Engelmann, President & CEO and Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

A few weeks ago we posted the first article in a five-article series that outlines Geonetric’s strategy framework for eHealth: the eHealth Maturity Model. The article focused on the first level of the model which is critical mass adoption. Gaining adoption is definitely an important first step to a successful eHealth strategy, but it’s essentially a blind measure of the performance of your Web site or portal. Once you have gained adoption, you need to move on to the next step: measuring satisfaction. Although satisfaction is much more complex to measure, it provides more actionable insight from your visitors.

Just to refresh your memory, Geonetric’s Maturity Model includes five steps:

The patient experience

Most everyone measures patient satisfaction within their hospital settings, but few do it in a way that’s meaningful in terms of eHealth transactions. Taking a broad look at the entire patient experience, there are many aspects of patient satisfaction that happen before and after the actual physician encounter occurs. Many of these pre- and post-encounter activities are happening online with greater and greater frequency.

A Strategy Framework for eHealth

By Eric Engelmann, President & CEO

There’s a conceptual diagram out there that Gartner and others have assembled that tries to outline the progression of eHealth. It looks something like this:

Source: http://www.envision-ebusiness.com/piicm_printerfriendly.asp?recordid=2