Patient Experience

May 10, 2011

When more is less

Study of hospital website home pages shows average home page has 57.1 links.

One of the most important facets of successfully engaging consumers with your marketing is clarity. Clarity of message. Clarity of offerings. Clarity of names. And clarity of your hospital’s website. In one key way, many hospital websites struggle with delivering clear content because they offer too many choices to consumers. It may seem counter-intuitive – the more choices, the better, right? But many studies have shown that at a certain point, too many options debilitate a person’s ability to choose. In a commonly referenced study, researchers displayed 24 types of jam at a grocery store, and on a different day, displayed only 6. Common sense would say that by providing more options, you will serve a broader audience, and therefore sell more products. But researchers found the opposite: 30% of the customers who faced a choice of 6 jams bought a jar, but only 3% of the customers who faced a choice of 24 jams made a purchase. (For more on this study and dynamic, see this article in the Economist.)

Now let’s apply that thinking to websites. Could it be that the more choices hospitals provide on their home page, as measured by the links used on the home page, the harder it is for users to navigate? While certainly link quantity is just one way to measure the strength and usability of a website design, I believe there is a correlation between link quantity and usability: that is, the more links on the home page, the poorer the design, and the poorer the usability. Continue reading…

Nov 23, 2010

Happy Thanksgiving, healthcare marketers

In this week’s SmartBrief blog post, I give five reasons healthcare marketers can be thankful this holiday season. My favorite is #2 on the list, “The number of tools you can use to communicate with the people who need your organization’s services has increased exponentially.” What’s yours?

May 27, 2010

Gettin’ paid

Here’s the “How to Deal With a Leadership Challenge Tip of the Week.” We’ve heard this one a number of times over the years, but it’s become more frequent recently, and it goes a little something like this:

“Why should we invest in XYZ? We don’t get paid for that.”

This often comes from a CEO or CFO of a hospital, and what they mean is that whatever it is your asking them to invest in, the organization doesn’t get reimbursed for it. For example, we’ve heard this used in regards to investing in a better patient experience. One CFO we know said the following during planning for a major expansion:

“Why do we need to spend so much on patient rooms? We could just stick them in the hall and we’d get paid the same.”
Continue reading…

Feb 23, 2010

Healthcare branding and the law of expectations

The other day, I took my daughter to the dermatologist for a follow-up treatment for a minor skin ailment, her fourth visit. Her mom had taken her on the previous trips and had warned me that it could take awhile. Not the treatment, which included a quick evaluation by the doctor and a five-minute spray application. The wait.

The entire visit took an hour from start to finish, almost all of it waiting. “How could a dermatology practice afford such poor service?” I thought, especially given the multitude of options available to us in our area and the commodity level of care we needed. Continue reading…

Jul 15, 2009

Truth #4: If you want to know what will work in healthcare marketing, don’t ask your customers

The Truths We Hold Self-Evident: Fourth in a Series

A few years back, we worked with a large dental practice that wanted to stand out in the market. In the initial meeting, we discovered management believed their best bet was to promote the expertise of their dentists, a decision based primarily on the results of an annual survey that showed respondents ranked “skill of my dentist” number one from a list of values they thought important when choosing dental care. Continue reading…

Apr 15, 2009

More examples of how pricing is creeping into hc encounters

Yesterday, I had two experiences related to pricing in healthcare I’d never encountered before. First, I met with a nurse practitioner as part of my regular Type II diabetes follow-up. Things are progressing to the point where I might need to consider Insulin, and so she was outlining the different types of Insulin available and how they are used. In each case, she started with giving a general price point. For example, “Now this version, which is also fairly expensive, is used in these circumstances.” After three or four of these descriptions, I was intrigued enough to stop and ask: Continue reading…

Mar 29, 2009

Newspaper strikes back – oh, and it’s a great healthcare story

Perhaps the traditional media powers read Adam’s last blog post “Bye bye traditional media” and decided to launch a counter-strike. In this Sunday’s Star Tribune, the front page features a story by healthcare reporter Chen May Yee on new tactics by hospitals to collect payment for some procedures ahead of time. Here’s the counter-strike: the article, “Hospitals forced to become bill collectors,” is only available in the print edition of the paper. There is a teaser online, and I imagine at some point down the road (a few days? a week?) the story will end up on their web site. But for now, unless you pick up the paper itself, you’ll have to wait.

So there are two blog posts in one here: Continue reading…

Mar 9, 2009

Be there or be…healthy

Is it possible that the intense feeling you had when you were a student – the “be in your chair when class starts” mentality – is forcing people to make a choice between being healthy or not? As a recent article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press points out, that might be the case. Continue reading…