Healthcare Business Today

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Health Care Providers Must Sharpen Crisis Communications

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Plan to Respond to Growing Number of Systemic Threats   

By Liam Collopy

Despite a rash of cyber attacks and other growing threats to the medical profession, many healthcare companies and organizations are ill-prepared when it comes to effective crisis communications.

Cause for concern is getting acute, as consumers are more skittish than ever about their protected health information (PHI) being compromised, due to high-profile breaches such as Anthem and Allscripts.

The recent RSA Data Privacy Report, which surveyed 7,500 consumers in the U.S. and Europe, showed that 59 percent of the respondents were concerned about their medical data being compromised, while 39 percent were worried that a hacker would tamper with their medical information.

This year might be the worst year for computer breaches yet, with 67 percent of CISOs saying a cybersecurity attack will happen to their organization this year, according to a recent survey from Ponemon Institute. [Read more…]

Workshops Don’t Work – CIL Equation Solves That Problem

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By Rich Obertots

EVER HAD THIS HAPPEN

You go to a workshop and you get inundated with information – all day. You are exhausted at the end but so excited about it. Then what usually happens?

You get back to work – become overwhelmed with tasks and before you know it – it’s a year later and you are enrolling in another workshop – knowing the same outcome (or rather lack of outcome) is inevitable.

You took in so much – like a huge breath before going underwater – you try to hold it all in – then you exhale and it’s gone like bubbles of CO2.

WORKSHOPS DON’T WORK 

When you go to a workshop – it is like one very intense deep breath. It will not support life-long learning. Who could live on one deep breath? Who could learn on one deep breath?

[Read more…]

How Can Healthcare Brands Create a Better Value Equation for Customers?

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By Andrea Katz

It’s no secret that healthcare – now America’s top employer – is a huge mess.

The U.S. spends more money on healthcare per person than any nation in the world, yet it consistently ranks as the worst health system among the world’s most developed nations. Physician practices are being bought up by larger healthcare systems, as well as traditional insurers like Anthem and UnitedHealthcare. Consolidation is blurring the lines between insurers, pharmacy benefits managers and providers, while driving up costs for patients without improving quality of care. The fact that three corporate giants are banding together to form their own healthcare entity for their half-a million employees illustrates the gravity of the situation.

What role does branding have in all of this? Some healthcare brands spend heavily on advertising campaigns, but few connect with customers in a meaningful way, and patient satisfaction continues to suffer. Many of the industry’s biggest challenges may be outside the control of any individual organization, but here are 3 ways that branding can help create a better value equation for patients.

1. Change How the Patient Value Equation is Perceived

We often hear negative stories about patient care, but there are also many positive stories that need to be better told. Otherwise, the negative headlines will continue to drive the healthcare narrative unchallenged.

After investing $20 million in out-of-hospital patient care, Florida Hospital launched the Someday Starts Today campaign, focusing on the future of healthcare within the community rather than the advancements happening within their facilities. [Read more…]

9 Ways to Improve Your Patient’s Satisfaction

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So your healthcare facility has done its exit survey and follow-up phone call to gauge patient satisfaction. Job done, right? Wrong. Evidence suggests a handful of problems with driving overhauls and outcomes with subjective patient survey data. Not only do patients often leave out or avoid completely truthful responses, especially about not so great experiences with your organization, but lack of formal medical training and their own ideas of what ‘goals for success’ were may vary from what your survey details.

Not to say patient satisfaction surveys aren’t helpful and don’t encourage better care across the industry. There are tons of useful takeaways that can enhance everything from facility design to employee training. If your healthcare organization is looking for trending patient satisfaction improvements, don’t miss this list:

Look Up From Your Screen

Giving off signs that you are indifferent, don’t care, or aren’t listening can quickly foster both feelings of dissatisfaction as well as insecurity from the patient. As more and more healthcare administration becomes digital, charts make their way into tablets and laptops that doctors carry with them everywhere, constantly gazing at the screen to input new information, look up patient history, etc. Just like you would hate for someone to be staring down at their phone if you are trying to talk to them, so do patients find it difficult to take you as a healthcare provider seriously if you are not making eye contact but instead typing away the entire time they’re speaking.

Be Informative & Educational

Few things are more stressful and frustrating for patients than the “unknown.” Waiting on a diagnosis, test results, or simply to see a doctor to begin with is arduous and painstaking, especially if a patient is experiencing disconcerting symptoms including pain, seizures, nausea, etc. The patient (and their family) must be met with answers, and if not answers, information and an educational approach to helping them understand what is known about their condition and next steps.

Popping in and out to let them know “the CBC eliminated the possibility of infection but your systolic pressure is still worrisome” might sound helpful to a physician, but what does that mean to the non-medical school trained person who is under a lot of stress? Instead, a more comprehensive dialogue including simple information may help. For example, a physician could instead say “With the blood test we were looking for these markers which would indicate there was some sort of infection going on, and great news, right now it shows there is none. We recommend tracking your blood pressure at home with a blood pressure pump and logging it for a week, and we’ll order home health to pay you regular visits for a couple weeks to monitor symptoms.”

Don’t Feign Empathy, Practice It

In a hospital or home health situation, actions speak much louder than words. When a patient raises a concern or asks for some help, saying you’ll do something about it means little if it never gets addressed or done. Train healthcare professionals and employees to follow through on practicing empathy, putting themselves in the patient’s place and striving as much as possible to complement superior care with comfort and friendliness can go a long way to patient satisfaction.

Do some details simply get missed or overlooked? Yes, no healthcare facility is perfect. Taking responsibility, however, and avoiding placing blame can help patients feel even more taken care of and give employees more freedom to work harder at getting it right the next time.

Remember the Little Things

An oxymoron is a neurologist’s office without a handicap accessible doorway. When people with conditions ranging from epilepsy to MS and Parkinson’s, many of whom use mobility aids and wheelchairs to get around, go to their specialist and can’t even make it in the door without a whole lot of effort or waiting on someone to help them, there is a problem. Things like that, or having change-only vending machines in your hospital waiting room with no way for people to make change, send very clear cues to patients that your health care management simply does not care on some of the most basic levels.

Prioritize Scheduling

For patients with chronic conditions like advanced MS or Alzheimer’s, scheduling plays a critical role in their day to day existence. Waking, sleeping, meals, meds, toiletings, naps, etc. all happen at the same time each day to maintain stability and structure for daily success. For health care providers, recognizing the importance of scheduling seems second nature – shift changes happen at the same time everyday, rounds relatively occur around the same time each day, so what’s the big deal? When it comes to patient satisfaction, especially with home health agencies, scheduling regular nurse visits and communicating expectations clearly with patients and caregivers is crucial. A patient receiving a text the night before from a nurse that says they may be able to make it sometime in the morning simply isn’t good enough.

Experience Care for Yourself

Want to know what the experience of your patients is like? Then live it. Park where they park, tour the hospital with a new patient, or engage a home health nurse as though you are a new patient who has never had home health care before. Walk the halls of your facility, try to get a snack or a drink of water. See how easy or hard it is to find a nurse, to get out of bed to the bathroom, to even read the whiteboard in the hospital room that lists date and care attendees. First-hand simulation can provide much more insight than surveys where patients may have an overall positive feeling of their stay but avoid sharing any negative or constructive criticism.

Evaluate Entire Care Teams Not Individuals

No health care environment will ever be without complaints. It is critical for healthcare professionals and management to address and answer complaints without brushing them off, and in evaluating patient satisfaction to look at the interactions of entire care teams and not just single providers. Why? Because the employee engagement between nurses, physicians, aides, techs, and administrators is a clearer reflection of experience. How does the care team work together to better the patient’s experience? When a complaint or concerned is raised, a health care employee should find the right person on the care team to address the complaint, not just say “it’s not their job.” Understanding the dynamics of the care team will also help healthcare organizations find gaps in care, efficiency, and human relations.

Look How Other Industries Are Succeeding

How are industries outside of a seemingly insular health care universe succeeding in people (user/customer) satisfaction? It might be a hotel that has instituted state of the art parking spaces with technology that helps People Park and get inside faster. Or an online e-commerce company that utilizes gasified digital surveys to encourage wider, more in-depth feedback from customers regarding their experience. Successful tactics might translate across industries and verticals – it’s important for management to keep their eyes peeled and follow the lead of others who are paving the way for more efficient and vigilant attention to user experience and sentiment. 

Seek Out New Technologies

As the digital landscape starts to include more and more healthcare organizations, leveraging technology becomes more and more pertinent to patient satisfaction. Not only can new medical technologies aid health care organizations and patients in tracking medical history, symptoms, and changes more efficiently, but digital solutions and communications systems are speeding up waiting and response times as well as helping people get around hospitals and facilities with more ease and less stress.

Author Bio:

Nathan Bradshaw is an expert marketer who specializes in promoting and growing physician practices. He currently works with UrgentWay to help improve their online footprint and garner interest in their Urgent Care, Occupational Health and Health Services.

Why United Airlines’ Woes Had Nothing To Do With Social Media

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As a social media manager who manages many corporate campaigns for my agency’s clients, I can’t help but sympathize with the poor soul who handles United Airlines’ social media accounts.

I can imagine that person driving to work Monday morning, listening to Gary Jules’ “Mad World” on repeat, dreading what the day would hold – all because of a total and incomprehensible lack of basic customer service.

By now, nearly everyone has watched the infamous viral video of a United Airlines passenger getting “voluntarily” yanked out of his seat by police, his face smashing into the armrest in the opposite row. Gasping passengers aimed their smartphone cameras at the ordeal, but no one with the United Airlines staff seemed to realize how bad the situation was – and certainly not how bad it was about to become.

They soon found out. News organizations reported on this PR disaster, social media skewered the company relentlessly, and competitors gleefully piled on.

And what’s been happening with those folks who manage the United Airlines’ social media? Just two posts have appeared on the United Airlines Twitter account since the incident. The first was a much-derided non-apology apology from CEO Oscar Munoz, who expressed regret for having to “re-accommodate these customers.”

The second came a day later, when the first post failed to capture the essence of what an apology is supposed to be. This time the CEO assured us that United would take “full responsibility and will work to make it right.” It was signed, simply, Oscar.

Although United Airlines’ Twitter has gone mum, the rest of the social media world hasn’t been so silent. Browse through United’s tweets prior to the incident and you’ll discover angry Twitter users finding clever and creative ways to weave the notorious incident into unrelated conversations. The results range from hilarious to savage.

But what would you expect? Any company that thinks this type of mistake (read: abhorrent, boneheaded, violent violation of the customer/business relationship) will go unpunished by the internet (read: actual human beings) is living in a different century. Consumers are more active now than they’ve ever been. They expect more than they ever have before. And they arguably have greater power than ever before because of social media.

Social media has created an avenue for consumers to make their voices heard, much to the detriment of companies who choose to put customer service on the back burner in favor of the bottom line.

Social media was never meant to be a place where customer service issues were handled. That’s just the way things evolved, at least in part because companies avoid dealing with problems their policies create until the collective voices rain down on them via their Facebook and Twitter profiles.

Can you blame customers who feel cheated or wronged for taking the only recourse they know how? I certainly can’t. Companies have a duty to service their customers in a fair and just way. Yes, mistakes can happen and in those cases customers will do their best to take to traditional means to get their problems solved. If those avenues don’t work or are too inconvenient, to Twitter they’ll go.

What’s really unfortunate from a PR standpoint – and social media manager standpoint – is that the United Airlines situation could have been avoided.

United Airlines needed four people off that flight. They asked for volunteers, offering vouchers as enticement, but couldn’t clear the seats they needed. So they chose passengers themselves and ordered them off the plane. When the doctor, already in his seat, declined to leave the police were brought in and social media infamy followed.

What should have happened instead? The airline could have simply raised their offer for vouchers. They could have enticed someone to give up their seat by other means. A volunteer could have been found, if only they’d been willing to pay for it.

This incident should remind companies that they need to take a hard look at the policies they have in place when dealing with customer disputes. They need to train their employees to identify and disengage when their policies are causing needless escalations.

They should do this because it will help them avoid a PR disaster but, more importantly, because it’s the right thing to do. The viral videos, hashtags, posts, articles, and subsequent hit to their stock prices are just an after effect.

So let’s make it happen, brands. Let’s come together for a united effort to do right by our customers. Your customers—and the folks who manage your social media accounts —will thank you.

Jay York is senior social media strategist for EMSI Public Relations (www.emsincorporated.com), a firm that represents corporations and experts in a wide array of fields such as business, health, food, lifestyle, politics, finance, law, sports and entertainment. York, whose extensive experience in social media marketing dates back to the early days of MySpace and LiveJournal, helps EMSI clients make sense of the vast realm of digital marketing, from creative social media to overall marketing strategy.

5 Tips on Automating Social Media Marketing

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As a marketing healthcare professional, you want your social media tasks to be more efficient. You certainly don’t want to sacrifice quality, but you want to spend more time with customer contact, strategy and other activities that also drive business. There are plenty of automation tools out there to help you, but there are some things you should know about social media automation that will help you make the right decisions. Here are some tips on automating your social media marketing.

Fill Your Social Media Calendar, But Don’t Check Out

You know you have to post high-quality content. It’s a competitive landscape, and you want your posts to do their job, which is to create engagement and drive traffic. Social media automation tools (especially PromoRepublic) can help you do that. You can create and auto schedule posts on certain days to make sure you’re posting consistently.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is important, however, to make sure you don’t make your social feed look like you’re dialing it in. People pay attention these days. Holidays, events, special days and more can help you fill your social media calendar with timely, contextual and relevant posts that look thoughtful. Carelessly posting will make you look, well, careless.

Check out PromoRepublic’s calendar of ideas to schedule professional looking posts in seconds

Know When You Need to Be Around

Just because you have your posts scheduled and you know they are good does not mean that you can never be present on social media. In fact, if your posts are doing their job, you can expect quite a bit of engagement on your posts. Since it’s vitally important for your social presence to have a real face and voice behind it, automating replies is a definite no-no. That means you need to:

  • Reply to comments yourself and in real time
  • Answer questions yourself and in real time
  • Reply to private messages personally and in real time
  • Retweet manually (more on this in a minute)
  • Leave comments on pages and tweet at people yourself

A word about retweets. There are people who retweet every tweet that mentions them. DO NOT DO THAT. It’s self promotional, it annoys people and it creates tons of Twitter clutter. Don’t be responsible for Twitter clutter.

Knowing when you need to be around doesn’t mean that you have to haunt your social media channels 24/7. Pay attention to when your comments, likes and questions tend to come in and try checking in at those times. If that doesn’t work, set notifications for your social channels OR, check in at certain times every day and communicate those times to your fans and followers. It will give you added opportunities for Facebook Live events and Twitter Groups. And, speaking of timing…

Make Sure You Have An Ideal Posting Schedule for Each Channel

It’s all well and good to create posts your audience wants to see. But, if you post it at a time that they won’t see it, you aren’t doing your social media duties properly. Luckily, figuring out what time to post isn’t very hard. Certain automation tools can help you, but Facebook and Twitter have native apps that tell you all you need to know about optimal posting times. You want to figure out:

  • Where are the majority of your fans and followers?
  • What time do you get likes and shares on your posts?
  • When are you available to check social media?

Yep, it’s best to schedule posts with potential engagement (and that’s all of them, Folks) for times that you might be around to respond to comments and questions. So, combine point 2 with this point, because the very best social media marketers use their intuition and the analytics to tell them when to post, and when to be there to respond.

Yes, Set Notifications if You Have To

We sort of glossed over it earlier, but notifications are some social media marketer’s favorite tools. Again, there are third party apps out there that will let you know when someone reacts on Facebook or Twitter, but those platforms have that option built right in.

With Facebook, it’s under Settings>Notifications. You can set email notifications or text notifications for messages, posts on your timeline, comments on your links, and more.

Twitter, same deal. It’s under Settings>Email notifications and you can tell Twitter to email you when someone mentions you in a Tweet that’s liked and lots of other scenarios. You never have to miss a potential interaction on social media. You just have to decide how many emails you’re able to handle.

Curate With Care

You know the 5-3-2 rule, right? We’ve talked about it before. For every ten things you post, five should be content from others, three should be content from you, and two should be content that’s personal. Everybody’s definition of content from others, your own content and personal content differs. Of course when you share content from others, you have to make sure it’s relevant to your audience. Whether you’re sharing a blog post, someone else’s status, or retweeting, keep your audience in mind when choosing curated content.

While there are plenty of tools out there, like BuzzSumo and others, that will help you find relevant content to curate, this is a time where we believe it is especially important to listen closely to your social audiences and find content organically that is a good fit for your needs.

The reason is, if you take yourself on your customer’s fact-finding and information mining mission, you will likely understand them better. And, once you find the right blog post or article that they want to see, before they know they want to see it, you know you’ve succeeded.

Never miss an opportunity to connect with your social audience.

Alla Bogdan is a dDigital marketer and content creator with love to technology, self-education and new opportunities. Biblio and linguaphile.

 

 

 

The Top Social Media Trends for 2017 – The Influencers View

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By Todd Grossman
Talkwalker CEO

2016 was a big year for social media.

From Facebook’s big push in live video, to Instagram muscling in on Snapchat’s stories format, the tussle between social networks has been fierce as each platform battles for a share of your attention. We’ve also seen social media affect globally significant events like the “Brexit” referendum in the UK and the US election, as politicians wise up to the impact social networks can have on public opinion. We’re now spending almost 2 hours a day on social media or about 15% of our time awake.

So what will 2017 bring and what social media trends do businesses need to be aware of next year? That’s the question we posed to some of the biggest names in the social media world. Here are 8 trends they expect to see next year.

#1: The power of social media giants will increase

It’s no secret that the giants of social media world want people to spend more time on their networks and not your own website. As user numbers grow and internet users spend an increasing amount of time on social, it’s time for social media marketers to work out how this will affect their strategy in 2017 say Michael Stelzner and Eric T. Tung.

“Algorithms, bots, artificial intelligence and people working for very big companies will destroy the business models of people who produce content by disrupting the free flow of information. In the very near future, information flow will be filtered and measured and censored in the name of “reducing clutter” and revealing “only what’s important.” Facebook will decide what you see. Google will serve up only that content that complies with its rules and are housed on its servers. Email solutions like Gmail and Yahoo will tighten their own algorithms so even reaching the inbox is at risk. (Video Quote: The information distribution highway will have toll stations that must be paid for by the those who create content. If you want your content seen, you’ll need to house it inside the companies that control the toll stations. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and more will incentivize content creators to not link to off-site content. These large businesses will become the equivalent of the 1990s America Online–a type of “Hotel California,” where you can enter but never leave.) Traffic to websites will decline and blogs will shut down. Gone will be the days of information flow and true information freedom. The future will only be more controlled, more filtered and less open. Are you ready for the change?”

Social media in 2017 will continue to change and consolidate. We’re going to see more acquisitions, as power continues to collect in the hands of a few, and smaller players who can’t monetize will be left behind. Devices will be more integrated into marketing and entertainment, augmented reality, virtual reality, and 360 video will become mainstream. Twitter and Yahoo will become shells of their former selves and become acquired. And companies will need to reformulate social strategy and content strategy to provide more levels of education, entertainment, and education, rather than the thinly-veiled marketing collateral it’s become. We probably won’t see GM or AT&T doing BuzzFeed like video stunts, but people will be less and less tolerant of marketing crap. [Read more…]