What Makes a Good Hospital Web Site?

By Eric Engelmann, President & CEO

When asking hospitals what makes a good Web site, we often hear terms like “interactive capabilities,” “easy to use” and “has lots of content, especially educational content.” While these aren’t necessarily wrong, it’s what’s not on this list that’s disappointing.

Imagine asking Michael Dell about what it is that makes Dell.com “good.” Or Jeff Bezos about what makes Amazon.com a “good” Web site. Of course it has to be easy to use. But strategically, the thing that makes dell.com or amazon.com “good” is that the Web sites are intricately tied to executing business strategy. Both of those companies used the Web site as core, critical parts of how they delivered on their missions.

Why Has EMR Been So Hard?

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

I just finished reading Why the healthcare system doesn’t want electronic medical records on Techdirt, and I have to say, I don’t buy it.  The article proposes that some vast conspiracy designed to fleece the public through deliberate inefficiencies is at the root of the pushback against going digital.

I’ve spent a more than dozen years now in various places within the healthcare landscape and I can tell you we’re not organized and coordinated enough to pull something like that off.

In all seriousness though, the problem is very real. But it just doesn’t derive from anything so pernicious as a raw profit motive.  It’s much more about misalignment of incentives.  Let’s look at this in a different way:

Are We Defining Meaningful Use Or Defining EHR?

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

As blue-ribbon committees begin to flesh out what the vague terms of the ARRA/HITECH initiative are intended to represent, they’ve triggered quite a lot of discussion.  Discussion of what does or does not constitute “Meaningful Use,” when various pieces of this definition might kick in, how many hospitals and physicians could potentially meet the 2011 criteria if they started right now  and if some of the recommendations will ever be a good idea.

As I watch all of this, I can’t help feeling that the workgroups aren’t really defining “Meaningful Use,” but rather, they’re trying to define “EHR.”

Healthcare — Is it Time to Haggle?

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

The Internet has fundamentally changed the way we do things.  Take buying a car, for example.  You can get loads of information about a given car model: service histories, user ratings, and what other people are actually paying for the car.  This information empowers consumers .  In negotiations, information disparity is the greatest tool available.  Taking that advantage away from the dealer fundamentally changes their bargaining position.

Much of the talk about the potential of bringing pricing transparency together with consumerism in healthcare is directed precisely at this goal.  How do we put consumers in a position to make more economical healthcare choices?  Arm them with information about costs!

Changing the World of Communications

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

Every now and then, I have one of those days and frustration is at the center of it.  Often, that frustration is due to the pace of change in the communications industry.

“But wait,” you say, “the Internet is moving so fast that we can barely keep up!  For goodness sakes, we’re on Web X.0 now!”

Somewhere, someone has moved on to that.  Amongst mainstream organizations (and particularly in healthcare), however, we’re still nibbling at the edges of the Web, social media, etc.  We’re using some of the tools, but few have really embraced the changes that underlie this.

Are you an Effective Communicator? Says Who?

By Linda Barnes, Vice President, Marketing & Communications

In a session at the IABC World Conference, the speaker shared an interesting statistic.

• 86 percent of executives say, “Yes, I’m an effective communicator.”
• 17 percent of their audience (polled on exit) agreed.

Ouch!

Learning from Best Buy

By Linda Barnes, Vice President,  Marketing & Communications

This week, I’m attending the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) World Conference. Yesterday I listened to the President and COO of Best Buy talk about internal communications. His passion for and belief in the power of communications and the importance of transparency was especially inspirational, as those are common goals at Geonetric.  Two comments that intrigued me:

How is the Economy Impacting Your Online Efforts?

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

We’ve recently launched our new survey – eHealth Insights.  In past years, Geonetric has run a huge annual survey for collecting data from online professionals in the healthcare industry.  Unfortunately, with the industry changing as fast as it does, our insights began to feel dated before we got our results out the door.

eHealth Insights surveys are very short (less than 5 minutes to complete). We will conduct them several times throughout the year so we can hit topical items and get actionable information into your hands quickly.

It’s not too late to participate in our first eHealth Insights survey!  Our topic is how eHealth initiatives and organizations are weathering the economic downturn.

How do things look so far?

Our preliminary results show that respondents are dealing with the economy fairly well.  While some organizations are seeing declining revenues and profitability, nearly as many are seeing growth in these areas.  Nevertheless, there is caution with conservative staffing and overall marketing investment levels.

Fortunately, investment in the Web and social networking is booming despite the overall cautious landscape.  Apparently, when the going gets tough, tough healthcare organizations are investing online!

So take 5 minutes and make sure your voice is heard!  We’ll close the survey on Thursday.

Transparency is Hard When the News Isn’t Good

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

Hospitals have been embracing transparency initiatives over the past few years, but those who have been most enthusiastic generally have a good quality story to tell.  What happens if you don’t have that stellar story?  What if, truth be told, the story is flat-out bad.

In that case, transparency takes some serious nerve.

And with that in mind, I got a great laugh out of this “article” on hospital transparency.

Embracing Changing Technologies

By Eric Engelmann, President & CEO

It’s always interesting to be the patient once in a while. I had my annual physical this morning, and my doctor happens to be at a hospital that’s going through a big EMR upgrade, first implemented just a few days ago. Both the nurse and the doctor I saw sighed noticeably when sitting down at the application, and of course when I casually asked about the new system, neither had anything positive to say about it. The questionnaire that my doctor was working through included a question about my alcohol consumption, to which I answered “1-2 drinks a week” (CEOs don’t get out much). She tried to type exactly that into the system, but got an error message “Please enter valid data.” She sighed again, and tried to figure out a few other ways to type it, until I suggested that perhaps it only wanted numbers, not letters. Sure enough, that worked. I’m a software guy, she’s an MD. It shouldn’t require a software guy to use.