On January 1, 2021, those requirements expand to include a consumer-friendly online presentation for at least 300 shoppable services. These rules force healthcare marketers to take a seat at the transparency table and help translate internal data into consumer-friendly content ready for the web.

Attend this session and learn how trends like industry consumerism and transparency are impacting legislation. Review what the current and proposed regulations call for, as well as why healthcare marketers should aim to go beyond compliance and find ways to help consumers make decisions about their care. Discover how organizations can use pricing strategically as well as position your system’s offerings beyond price alone.

Join us for this free webinar and learn:

• The background of the price transparency movement and how we got to where we are today
• What rules and regulations you need to be aware of, including dates and compliance requirements
• How to approach pricing strategically at your organization
• The differences between price transparency and cost estimation tools and how to use both to deliver value to your patients and potential patients
• What healthcare marketers should aim for with transparency initiatives to help consumers make educated decisions about their care

Content marketing — the strategy, the stakeholders, the editorial calendar planning, and the posting — can seem daunting. On top of all the other tasks in a marketer’s day, writing articles or shooting videos about stories inside the health system might lose priority.

Add to that stress a lack of internal resources or changing priorities, and it can be hard to finish the content you’d committed to create only a month ago.

That’s why patient stories – authored by real patients – can help relieve the tension and give your content marketing a new, authentic voice and perspective.

Benefits of Using Patient-Generated Content

A 2011 article in the New York Times cited “narrative communication” – or storytelling – as an effective way to help patients improve their health. That means when patients share stories, health outcomes can improve.

“Telling and listening to stories is the way we make sense of our lives,” according to Dr. Thomas K. Houston, who’s quoted in the article. He adds that storytelling can help readers accept a difficult diagnosis if they identify with a storyteller with the same condition.

Aside from the benefit it delivers to your audiences, storytelling also has the power to continue encouraging innovation and growth in service lines based on what patients say is working best.

For the storyteller, the opportunity to share a story can be relieving and therapeutic, especially if they care deeply about helping others in their shoes. The diversity of experiences also helps highlight your organization’s reach and focus on quality patient care.

Invite Patient Voices to Your Brand

While content marketing in healthcare is often – and rightly – focused on tips to help your patients and community members get well and stay healthy, don’t miss opportunities to bring patient voices into your online brand experience.

Consider inviting your patients to get involved in your content marketing by:

• Putting a call to action on social media. Ask your followers if they have a story about being a patient or family member of a patient of your organization. What’s the experience they’d like to share? Give them a direct way to contact you and share their story.
• Asking your patient and family advisory council, or PFAC, if you have one. These groups can provide insight into how people see your organization outside your walls. If you don’t have a PFAC, consider creating one.
• Letting patients opt to share their story via existing surveys and feedback processes. If you have a patient feedback process, let them know that you invite patient voices to be part of your content marketing experience.
• Using your website to generate story leads. If you have a content marketing hub today – or even if you don’t! – create an online form and appropriate call to action where people can submit their experience and volunteer to author a story. Check out how Bronson uses their Bronson Positivity microsite to get stories from patients, visitors, and caregivers.

Examples of Patient Stories

See how some healthcare systems apply the patient content strategy in their content marketing efforts.

MD Anderson Cancer Center

MD Anderson’s Cancer Center’s editorial brand Cancerwise shares its space with caregivers, too. Cora Connor is a caregiver for her brother, Herman, diagnosed with a rare cancer. In her two-part story, she shares not only her story of caregiving, but also of creating a community and becoming an advocate for people diagnosed with the same cancer as Herman.

Cora’s article adheres to the consistent voice and tone of MD Anderson’s brand, even though she’s not a member of the marketing team. Helpful cross-links to Herman’s doctor’s profile and other related content are available throughout the story. It even links to Cora’s previous story about being a loved one of cancer patient.

Cone Health Engages with Video Patient Stories

In Cone Health’s content marketing hub, Wellness Matters, patient Kimberley Thompson-Hairston shares her bariatric surgery journey and experience via video. The audio is Kimberley in her own words without narration or an interview-like structure typically seen in patient stories.

And Cone Health integrates her story – like the others they share– into the service lines represented. Kimberley’s experience led her to become an advocate for other bariatric surgery patients at Cone Health.

Your Staff Are Patients, Too

As you build your brand ambassadors and storytellers, look inside your organization, too. Your staff are patients, parents, caregivers, and loved ones of other patients, so why not explore their stories, too?

Avera Balance features articles from patients and staff writers alike, including Sonja Hegman, a contributing writer who shared her story about treating her cancer without traditional cancer treatments like chemotherapy and radiation.

Her story is heartfelt: She explains the questions she received after diagnosis, and the curiousness of people around her who wondered why she hadn’t lost her hair if she had cancer, even writing that she sometimes “felt guilty for not having enough cancer.”

Establish a Strategy & Workflow for Contributors

Before you send out a blanket invitation for articles from your patient community, make sure your marketing team’s content marketing strategy has a defined goal. For example, you’ll want to ask yourselves:

• How often should patient stories be included in the editorial calendar?
• What service lines do we want to grow volume for, and how could patient stories help?
• What’s the workflow for editing patient-generated content and making revisions?

While your marketing team writers would likely follow a brand style, voice, and tone guide, your patient audience may not be as privy to this experience. But, guiding them with high-level recommendations for how to write their story, what to share, etc. may be helpful.

You may also consider informing your contributors up-front about any edits and adjustments you’ll make to the final product. Subheads, images, and paragraph breaks — along with standard proofreading and editing — should be part of the agreement.

A patient-generated story template might also be a good way to set the stage for your expectations from patient contributors.

While inviting outside writers to your organization’s content marketing efforts might feel like another layer of governance, it can be a very rewarding experience for your brand. If you need help setting expectations, governance, and work flows for your team, contact Geonetric.

Be Transparent & Honest With Storytellers

Whether you’re engaging patients, family members, or staff to share their story, be up-front about your expectations and editorial process.

Consider creating a checklist to ensure the storyteller understands the process and knows what happens next. For example:

• Get written permission from the storyteller to share the story on your website, content marketing hub, social media, and beyond.
• Identify and communicate the goals and purpose of their story, how it will be shared, and what they can expect after publication (e.g. local press, social media followers, etc.). Be willing to support them post-publication if needed.
• Set expectations for process and timeline, including first drafts, revisions, proofreading, and final review before publication.
• Stay transparent through the process, including when you’re nearing publication. Ease anxieties by helping your storyteller understand the editing process, or giving a glimpse of how the article will look when it’s published.

Celebrate Your Brand Ambassadors

As a team member and employee of your health system, you no doubt represent your brand in public and online. But your organization’s patients, their loved ones, caregivers, and friends are just as much a part of your organization’s story. By including them in your storytelling and sharing their voice and experiences with your readers and audiences, you’ll connect with people who need guidance most.

Reach Out

If you need help getting started with your content marketing strategy, contact Geonetric. Our experts can help you find a content marketing model that fits your organization and resources and paves a way for brand wins.

The healthcare worker shortage is a nationwide topic. And it’s guaranteed your hiring managers are feeling the effects. A few facts that show just how critical this problem could become:

• 2.3 million new healthcare workers need to be hired by 2025 to provide adequate care, according to a report from professional services firm Mercer
• By 2032, the United States will face a shortage of nearly 122,000 physicians, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges
• One million registered nurses (RNs) will retire by 2030, according to the Journal of Nursing Regulation
• Shortages RNs will be worst in the southern and western parts of the United States, according to the American Journal of Medical Quality

As a marketer, you’re probably less involved in helping human resources compared with other needs, like promoting patient experience and medical services. But your marketing tactics are uniquely able to help HR recruit the employees that have such a huge impact on patient experience and access to care at your organization. Enter content marketing.

Check out how this hospital blog transitions to lifestyle site focused on health, wellness, and patient stories

Believe it or not, the right mix of content marketing stories can help fill HR’s talent pipeline. Here are seven ways you can leverage your content marketing to support hiring efforts.

1. Showcase your workplace culture

Did your pulmonology department participate in a local 5K race? Did your pediatric department host a trunk-or-treat (a Halloween trick-or-treat event) in your hospital parking ramp?

Sharing your culture and events through content marketing is a great way to draw in job-seekers and let them know what it’s like to be an employee at your organization.

2. Spotlight employee achievements

Whether it’s a nurse winning a Daisy Award, a receptionist hitting a milestone anniversary with the organization, or one of your doctors completing groundbreaking research, your employees do amazing things. Take time to recognize those achievements — to not only show off your impressive organization, but also to demonstrate to job-seekers how much you value employee contributions.

A few ways to do this could include:

• Feature stories about your staff’s accomplishments
• Video interviews with employees and their teams
• Video events, like Facebook Live events

3. Share your patients’ perspectives

Your patients have a lot of great things to say about what you do and how you do it. Their stories often focus on the interactions they had with members of their care teams. So invite patient input, and share their experiences via a feature story, video, or audio. You can even welcome them to write their own story and submit it online to share in your content marketing.

4. Feature your forward-thinking leadership

Sometimes an executive leadership team can seem inaccessible to both the public and your staff. Try a quick survey or a brief, five-question interview as an innovative, interesting way to gather and share fun facts. These stories are easy to share on your social channels, too, as a way to showcase how your leaders shape your organization’s culture and mission.

5. Invite new employees to center stage

Bringing on new talent to your organization is worth celebrating. Interview or survey new employees to get to know them, their roles, their backgrounds, and their interests, so people inside and outside the organization can get familiar with your growing pool of patient-focused talent.

6. Showcase diverse roles and experiences

There is more than one way to work in healthcare. Share stories about internships and other career-building opportunities for students. Showcase nonclinical staff and describe how they support the culture and the experience of patients and staff.

Your content marketing efforts don’t have to be limited to your clinical roles, patients and candidates alike can find value in these stories. Showing that you value all your employees could be a differentiator for potential employees who work in non-clinical capacities.

7. Create an email segment just for potential employees

If you’re using email as part of your content marketing mix, consider creating a list just for job-seekers. Let them sign up and opt-in for career-focused content on your site and send them relevant career articles and job postings so you’re engaging with them before they even apply. This also helps you learn what types of content are most meaningful to your job-seekers.

But First, Strategize

The careers section landing page is often the most-visited page on a healthcare website. Capture this audience by integrating job- and culture-related content marketing articles into your foundational career pages. This helps job-seekers see stories that are meaningful to them. In VitalSite, SmartPanels make this easy to do dynamically, but if you’re using a different CMS investigate what options you have to feature these stories.

Be strategic with HR-related content marketing. Plan stories and their use and distribution in an editorial calendar. This will help you keep the effort organized, fed, and up-to-date.

Although marketing doesn’t always get called on to help recruitment efforts, tactics like these might just be what fills that HR pipeline. And your amazing employees deliver amazing care, which is the story you’re out there telling every day.

Contact Us

Feeling overwhelmed? Our content marketing experts would love to help you make the most of your efforts to fill that HR pipeline — reach out today.

If you’re trying to appeal to a certain demographic, create and optimize content to suit their interests, and deliver it in the way they want to consume health information. For each piece of content you create — whether it’s a webpage, content marketing piece, or other external communication — consider the demographics of your ideal consumer.

Some Examples

Before you write a piece of content, picture the ultimate healthcare decision maker you’re intending to convert. The following examples list a topic of content and who you may be trying to target.

Once you’ve narrowed down the group(s) you want to read, view, or listen to your content, the guidelines in this blog post can help you strategize your messaging and delivery.

An Important Disclaimer

By necessity, this article uses generalizations based on research, making broad assumptions and assessments of different demographic groups. You can probably think of exceptions you personally know when it comes to the preferences of each of the groups discussed in this article. Let the information below guide you, but keep in mind you’re speaking to individual human beings, rather than monolithic groups.

It’s also smart to break “stage of life” or generational groups down into social groups you know exist in your target geographic area. If you want to increase your millennial audience, for example, what do people in this age bracket in your community, specifically, care about? Do some keyword research and investigate online communities, such as social media groups and forums, to find out. Affinity groups in Google Analytics are also a nice way to get a sense of how various user groups fit into the community.

If your target audience wants to get or stay fit, cook convenient and healthy meals, or achieve work-life balance while working from home, create or tailor your content accordingly. Your research can help you build audience personas.

How to Sway Millennials

Millennials — born between 1981 to 1996 — are now the largest age demographic in the United States. According to the Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) Health Index, the most common conditions diagnosed in this generation are:

• Behavioral and mental health concerns like depression, substance use disorder, hyperactivity, and psychotic conditions
• Chronic conditions like high blood pressure, Crohn’s disease/ulcerative colitis, high cholesterol, and type II diabetes

If you’re trying to target millennials, content about these conditions could help you reach them.

When you think about your current marketing efforts to this group, you may be trying to attract young adults to your primary care or urgent care services, or bring expectant mothers to obstetricians and parents to your pediatricians. But it’s important to build brand loyalty with millennials today so they continue to look toward your organization for care as they age and increasingly access services.

To best reach idealistic, tech-savvy millennials:

• Consider ad-buys on services Millennials use, such as music streaming apps like Pandora and Spotify
• Emphasize the ways your organization makes care convenient and affordable
• Highlight your organization’s mission and values, emphasizing how your audience supports a higher purpose when they choose your organization —and be as authentic and transparent as possible
• Include ratings and reviews on physician profiles, respond to online reviews (both positive and negative), and manage your online reputation
• Leverage social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat, and publish relevant content your audience wants to read, share, and comment on — that means using visual storytelling and videos on channels they’re best suited for
• Promote digital solutions (like telehealth e-visits, online appointment scheduling, chat bots, text message reminders, or the functionality of your patient portal) that bring engagement online and make life more convenient
• Strategize your brand personality through your editorial style, voice, and tone, and keep that personality consistent throughout your content
• Take a mobile-first approach to your online properties, especially your website

Reaching Generation X

Gen X spans people born in the mid-1960s through 1980. Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) Health Index’s states they’re most often diagnosed with conditions like:

• Cardiovascular diseases, such as coronary artery disease, congestive heart failure and arrhythmia
• Type II diabetes
• High blood pressure
• Obesity
• Cancer (mainly prostate and breast cancer)
• Mental health concerns, like anxiety and depression

You may hear Gen Xers referred to as “the sandwich generation,” meaning they’re sandwiched between the children and parents they’re responsible for caring for and making health-related decisions on behalf of.

Gen Xers are considered skeptical to the point of cynicism. But the good news, as Adweek reports, is that when a Gen Xer trusts your brand, they’re more likely than any other generation to remain a loyal consumer.

Write content that’s compelling to the “Breakfast Club” generation when you:

• Build trust by providing detailed information they need to make a discerning, informed choice — Gen Xers can be knowledgeable when it comes to health topics, and they understand the value of evidence-based care
• Emphasize one-to-one provider-patient relationships, and explain the ways patients can communicate with members of their care team face-to-face and digitally
• Engage with Gen Xers online, and publish content on Facebook and YouTube, social channels Gen Xers use often
• Focus on living well, especially when it comes to improving or maintaining their physical appearance
• Recognize the importance and value of their relationships, especially the kids and parents they may look out for
• Use data, such as quality scores, to prove your arguments and competitive differentiators; showcase the awards or certifications your staff or departments have won and what they mean in terms of how patient benefit

Targeting Baby Boomers

People born between 1946 and 1964 are Baby Boomers, and this group accounts for 43% of today’s healthcare spending. Thanks to advances in medicine and healthier lifestyles, this demographic is living longer, and about 20% of Americans will be over 65 by 2030. Now in their 50s to early 70s, Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) Health Index found Boomers are experiencing conditions like:

• Type II diabetes
• Heart disease
• Cancer
• Eye problems
• Arthritis
• High blood pressure

Almost 20% of all Americans have a disability, so making your website and other online properties accessible is important no matter what demographic you’re trying to reach. It’s even more critical for Boomers, with a disability rate of 25% today — a number that’s expected to increase as they age. Make sure your website, in particular, offers an intuitive user experience that makes it easy for users of all abilities to find and consume the information they’re searching for.

To convince Boomers you’re the best choice for care:

• Appeal to their health consciousness — focus not only on managing conditions, but living and aging well, maintaining independence and abilities
• Build positive relationships with members of the press in your community, and aim for news coverage that casts your brand in the best light – Boomers consume traditional news media more than other generations
• Choose “senior” instead of “elderly” or “geriatric”, and never use ageist language or reinforce ageist stereotypes
• Humanize your brand with an approachable and informative voice and tone
• Make sure your content is free of errors
• Make your content shareable — Boomers are 19% more likely to share content than other demographic groups
• Optimize the patient experience with helpful customer service available at every step
• Reach them on Facebook, their preferred social network, and through blog posts and videos, and support your digital efforts with TV ads

How to Appeal to Women

In the U.S., women are the primary medical decision makers not only for themselves, but also for their family members. And women are more likely than men to serve as a caregiver to a loved one. The American Marketing Association reports 80% of healthcare decisions are made by women. The same article states 74% of women prefer gender-neutral messaging, rather than gender-specific marketing. What’s the takeaway? While you should try to make your marketing appealing to women, be careful not to veer into pandering. And keep in mind that there are few actual differences between how women and men research health information online.

Build positive relationships with women consumers by:

• Avoiding overuse of “feminine” colors (read: pink) or imagery that objectifies women’s bodies (my personal pet peeve is headless pregnant bellies) or makes use of the meme-worthy chestnut “women laughing alone with salad”
• Being authentic, educational, and thought-provoking
• Emphasizing how your organization gives back to your community
• Leveraging content marketing effectively, including blog posts, videos, and social media posts
• Making sure your marketing is optimized for online audiences, because women are more likely than men to search for health information online
• Noting amenities that make getting health or wellness services more appealing
• Reaching them on the devices and channels (like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest) they enjoy; a study by Bustle found 81% of female millennials say social media is the best avenue for brands to reach them
• Steering clear of stereotypes — like the assumptions all women are obsessed with their weight, weddings/marriage, or motherhood
• Striking a positive, empowering tone that gives your female readers agency and supports their choices about their health and bodies

How to Appeal to Men

The general consensus is that men are an untapped audience when it comes to medical care and healthcare marketing. If you’re trying to increase patient volume for services aimed at men, consider these tactics:

• Avoid sexist phrases that shame men, like “man up,” and stereotypes that men supposedly aren’t interested in or incapable of cooking, child care, or other traditionally “feminine” activities
• Choose words and phrases that make the benefits of your services relevant to men, and try to strike a functional tone — men “look for a promise of efficacy that produces a desirable result”
• Highlight the convenience of your services
• Leverage mobile ads, which 68% of men say make them likely to make a purchase
• Publish content regularly about men’s health topics in an email newsletter or blog
• Underscore long-term benefits of healthcare, such as continuing to have the energy and abilities to do one’s favorite activities
• Target the women in their lives — their partners, moms, sisters, or friends — who can convince them to visit a healthcare provider

Get Help from the Experts

Let Geonetric’s content strategists and digital marketers help you make data-driven decisions about appealing to your target consumers, with help conducting keyword research, localization services, market segmentation and audience analysis, and developing personalized content that drives conversions.

Your website is the place where you can showcase all the types of care you offer and strategically guide people to the option that’s best for their symptoms or condition. Choosing the right care setting—whether that’s a primary care clinic, an urgent care center, a virtual visit, or the emergency department—can save patients money and time, and improve their satisfaction with your organization.

1. Use Your Homepage Effectively

If guiding patients to appropriate care settings is a high priority, build a homepage that helps you meet that goal.

Your homepage is probably the most visited page of your site. Focus its valuable “above-the-fold” space on connecting users with the type of care that’s right for them. Use design, functionality, and content to showcase the options your patients have to choose from, and then give them an easy way to learn more.

An Example: ProHealth

ProHealth Care’s homepage focuses on helping users learn about same-day and next-day care options. Whether users are on desktop or mobile, choices for quick care are front and center. Once they’re ready to learn more, they can click on the name of the service to see how to take the next step.

Another Example: Adventist HealthCare

Adventist HealthCare’s home page uses buttons to represent a continuum of care and funnel patients to content about the type of care they need. Depending on where they are in their health care journey, users might opt to learn about living a healthy life, or they may choose to focus on primary, specialty, or urgent or emergency care.

2. Make It Easy to Compare Care Options

Patients don’t always know where to go for care—and they’re looking to you for guidance. It’s essential to present information on your care options in a way that’s easy to understand.

Create a great user experience by using content and design to make it easy for patients to compare their options for quick care when they’re sick.

Show pertinent information about each quick care option – primary care, urgent care, retail clinics, virtual visits, etc. – in one place so users don’t have to hunt for information across your site.

An Example: Rush Copley Medical Center

Rush Copley Medical Center in Aurora, Illinois, found success by creating a “Where to Go for Care” page in their health services section.

Rush Copley uses subheadings to identify and guide readers through their care options. Each care option lists services available and conditions treated to help readers determine the best place for care. The page also features a short video and a PDF users can download and print.

To help readers understand the importance of choosing the right type of care, Rush Copley explains the benefits of how going to the right place of time can save time and money.

3. Optimize Service Line Content

When you follow web writing best practices, you’ll build service line content that’s appreciated by both users and search engines.

Dive into keyword research to see how consumers in your area talk about each service and what questions they’re asking. Then, develop content that answers these questions and naturally incorporates priority keywords.

Keyword research related to walk-in care often reveals phrases such as “when to go to urgent care”“urgent care near me,” and “paying for urgent care.” Symptoms also are frequently searched.

Help users engage with your service line content by

• Focusing on your user
• Keeping content simple and easy to scan
• Cross-linking to related content, such as location profiles and related service lines
• Including a strong call to action

An Example: Olmsted Medical Center

Improve user experience by creating actionable content that cross-links to relevant information like Olmstead Medical Center’s convenient care page does. This helps readers easy move through your site and understand the next steps they need to take to receive care.

Grow your monthly pageviews when you follow our web writing tips to develop content for service lines like telemedicine and urgent care.

Olmsted Medical Center made similar updates to their content and are enjoying an impressive year-over-year increase in pageviews, including a 25% increase to their convenient care page.

4. Prioritize the Mobile Experience

Cone Health partnered with Geonetric to focus their homepage on the idea of “right care, right place, right time.” It was important to the organization to make sure both desktop and mobile users could easily learn about and connect with a wide range of services. User research helped the team develop a dynamic homepage that’s well-received—and well-used—by patients.

What’s Your Approach?

Need help determining the best approach to helping consumers understand their options for care at your organization? Contact us. Geonetric’s content strategists and writers understand the complexity of health care and know how to write content that users and search engines love.

The question now is: How do you get the best return on your investment?

Join Geonetric’s healthcare content experts and learn why the strategy behind your content marketing is just as important as the quality of the stories you’re pushing out. Whether you’re new to content marketing, feel like you’re just going through the motions, or struggling to keep up with demand in a meaningful way, you’ll walk away from this webinar ready to invigorate your content marketing and deliver real value.

Learn about ways to:

• Use personas and patient journey maps to tie content marketing efforts to your audience’s real-life experiences and concerns
• Apply keyword research to make user-centered decisions about content
• Build editorial calendars that keep your team on track to create and publish the right mix of content
• Leverage CRM to gain insight into your audience’s behaviors and meet them where they’re at

Five Web Design Trends Worth Your Attention

Trends focused on supporting intuitive experiences, giving users the information they are seeking with ease, are always in style. Savvy organizations are finding new ways to use design to tell their brand stories and better connect with their audiences, uniquely differentiating themselves from their competition.

What does this mean to healthcare marketers and your websites? Today, patients want convenience, exceptional care, and remote access. A first impression online that provides users with a convenient, intuitive, easy access to their top tasks can potentially kick-start a successful patient journey and ongoing, positive relationship. Design, if accompanied by the right content, will help produce this experience.

Here are the top five design trends for 2020 that healthcare marketers should pay attention to and how your organization could benefit from incorporating some of these into your web strategy.

#1: Inclusive design

Accessibility is an important topic in healthcare web design right now. But stepping back and thinking about accessibility as part of the bigger theme of inclusive design is really where your focus should be. Considering the needs of a diverse population provides a better understanding of your audience.

Building inclusive thinking into the design process early will ultimately provide a better user experience for all visitors on your site, as well as save money and time by not having to retrofit your site to meet accessibility standards. For example, consider color contrast, alternative text for images, text resizing capabilities and many other standards to make your site more accessible. Listen to our on-demand webinar on Website Accessibility and Healthcare to learn more.

#2: Minimalism

Minimalism isn’t a new concept. It’s about expressing only the most essential and necessary elements in a design. This translates into website designs that use space intentionally between elements as to not overload the user, displaying the information users are truly seeking, and making their click path more easily identifiable.

Minimalism is just as much about the functionality as we see more experiences allowing for one-tap registration and instant payment. This comes to mind when thinking about a patient’s click path for actions such as scheduling an appointment, finding a doctor, registering for an event or making an online bill payment. Using minimalism effectively can lead the user through the page by organizing the content and providing balance among the other design elements.

#3: Purposeful micro-interactions

Micro-interactions are small design elements with a single purpose that create engaging, welcoming and human moments for users while interacting with your site. These elements tend to communicate status and provide feedback, helping users see the results of their actions. Popular micro-interactions include simple animations, swipe actions, animated buttons, and call to actions that have a bit of action associated with them, nudging the user to interact.

Micro-interactions can strengthen a brand’s representation based on its active visual and motion design, creating an attached emotion for the user. Visitors can customize their experience based on how they choose to interact with the site. It is important to know your users well in order to serve them effectively with interactions that enhance their overall experience and not take away from it.

#4: Tailored experiences

New devices are inevitable as technology continues to advance and design will continue to adapt as necessary along with it. Web design will have new opportunities to create unique, relevant experiences for users, such as with foldable, touchable displays, voice user interfaces, and personalization based on collected data.

Traditional care is shifting along with technology and with more patients utilizing the convenience of telehealth and other remote healthcare resources, organizations will need to rethink how to best design and create experiences to meet their patients’ needs.

#5: Custom, brand-driven elements

Some of the more visually focused design trends are including dark layouts, diverse typography, and custom illustrations. Dark mode, or using light-colored text, icons, and graphical user interface elements on a darker background, is becoming a popular option, especially as trend-setters Apple and Slack have been embracing it. Dark mode can provide a more enjoyable user experience, drawing the content out and creating a sleek, bezel-less display or illusion on mobile that your website’s design goes from one edge to the other.

Designs are also experimenting more with typography after many years of bold, lowercase sans-serif typefaces. Typography is seeing a bit of rejuvenation with artistic executions and unlikely combinations. Additionally, purposeful, custom illustrations and brand elements are on the rise, translating information to incite emotion to take action and strengthening the brand identity.

Create a great design experience

Deciding whether or not to include design trends into your website is dependent on your organization’s and users’ needs. Regardless of what you decide, use design as a tool to produce the positive experience intended for your site’s visitors and effectively tell your brand story.

And remember, if you’re unsure of how to move forward with your web and design strategy, call in the experts. And, be sure to check out our Digital Marketing Trends to Watch in 2020 webinar for more discussion on healthcare marketing and web design trends.

“We believe the American people have a right to know the price of services before they go to visit the doctor.” – President Donald Trump

In January 2019, CMS rules requiring hospitals to share a file with chargemaster data for their services went into effect. This data is, at best, useless to consumers and, at worst, harmful as consumers may make important care decisions based on vastly overestimated or underestimated costs.

This was always framed by the administration as only the first step in its push for healthcare price transparency, so it should come as no surprise that an additional set of rules was finalized in the fall which goes into effect January 1, 2021.

Before we dive into what these new rules say, it’s important to note that there have already been legal challenges to the price transparency rule and it is likely there will be changes implemented before it goes into effect.

As of today, there are actually two new rules coming into play – one rule for hospitals and another for health plans.

Requirements for hospitals

Here are the highlights of the plan for hospitals:

• Expand the “Standard charges for items and services” file from the existing rules. Remember the machine-readable file of “standard charges” that you posted in January? This rule maintains that file but expands the definition of “standard charges” to include:
• Gross charges (as found in the hospital’s chargemaster)
• Payer-specific negotiated charges
• Discounted cash prices
• De-identified minimum and maximum negotiated charges
• In addition to the expanded definition of “standard charges”, CMS has created some other definitions to clarify some elements of the transparency rules:
• Hospital – An institution that is licensed as a hospital by the state or locality. This means these rules apply to specialty hospitals such as cancer hospitals or children’s’ hospitals but not federally owned or operated facilities such as those run by Indian Health Services, VA hospitals, or Department of Defense facilities (these facilities also don’t negotiate prices.)
• Items and services – “All items and services (including individual items and services and service packages) provided by a hospital to a patient in connection with an inpatient admission or an outpatient department visit for which the hospital has established a charge.”

  Basically, the list of “standard charges” must include all of the pieces for which the hospital has established charges, but not the pieces which it does not control such as third-party ambulance services or non-employed providers.

• Provide a consumer-friendly online presentation for at least 300 shoppable services. CMS defines shoppable services as “a service that can be scheduled by a health care consumer in advance, and has further explained that shoppable services are typically those that are routinely provided in non-urgent situations that do not require immediate action or attention to the patient, thus allowing patients to price shop and schedule such services at times that are convenient for them.” For each service, the following data should be available:
• Payer-specific negotiated charges
• Discounted cash prices
• De-identified minimum negotiated charges
• De-identified maximum negotiated charges
• 70 of the shoppable services are dictated by CMS. The remainder is selected by the hospital. If the hospital provides less than 300 shoppable services, then list all appropriate services that they do provide. If the hospital doesn’t offer all of the CMS selected services, then add more hospital selected options to get as close to 300 as possible.

Unlike the previous rule, CMS has added the additional requirements that these files and tools are displayed prominently, are easily accessible, and are presented without barriers such as paywalls or registrations.

The new rule also adds a mechanism for monitoring and enforcement. While monitoring will follow complaints to CMS, there is now a penalty for failing to publish this information with fines as high as $300 per day.

Requirements for health plans

A second proposed rule also adds price transparency for health plans, the highlights include:

• Health plans must disclose negotiated rates for in-network providers and allowed amounts paid for out of network providers on a public website
• In addition, health plans will need to offer a transparency tool to provide members with personalized out-of-pocket cost information for all covered services in advance. “This requirement would empower consumers to shop and compare costs between specific providers before receiving care…” according to CMS.

Compliance is only a beginning – using price strategically

The first piece of this puzzle is being in compliance, that’s only a minimum bar for what your organization can and should do through this process.

The esoteric and highly variable nature of reimbursements for healthcare services has taken away one of the key tools of marketers and strategists within our industry. Remember back to Marketing 101 – what’s the last of the 4 Ps of marketing? Price!

Understanding your organization’s prices and sharing that information with consumers may be a little scary, but it opens the potential for you to begin using pricing strategically.

This begins by rationalizing prices for services within your healthcare enterprise. As you get the information assembled to meet the new compliance requirements, you’re likely to find that the same services have very different costs from location to location. These variations have been the norm in healthcare but can you justify the variation in a consumer’s out of pocket costs when that information is publicly available?

Your organization will need to take the time to sort through its pricing information to ask, possibly for the first time, what the costs for a service really ought to be and, if those costs will vary for site to site, how will that be explained or justified?

From there, we now have the opportunity to think about how price can be used to influence consumer behavior. Do we bundle a set of services together to give consumers greater predictability? Do we offer discounts or waive deductibles to steer patients to underutilized surgical suite times or less busy outpatient surgery locations? Price transparency opens the door to increase your competitiveness in ways that weren’t previously possible.

Does this accomplish what health consumers really need?

As an industry, we’ve been pushing our patients to act like health consumers. Co-pays and deductibles have soared in an attempt to force health consumers to be more active in healthcare decision making. Consumers have responded and, after years of talking about the rise of health consumerism, are now directing billions of healthcare dollars.

The challenge that we face now is that consumers are often poorly equipped to make these important decisions. Information on the price of services is an important piece of the puzzle but, ultimately, if we only give consumers information on the price of services, they’ll make decisions based only on price. Which doesn’t necessarily benefit the patient or the organization.

I’ve long viewed transparency in healthcare as a three-legged stool – price, quality, and experience. This is the next stage or price rationalization.

• Are you pricing services appropriately given your quality metrics relative to competitors?
• Is the experience that you deliver for your patients up to snuff given your price?
• What changes do you make if your three-legged stool is out of balance?

Healthcare has made great strides over the years in quality transparency through the publication of a variety of quality metrics and reports as well as in the area of experiential transparency in the publication of patient satisfaction survey information such as HCAHPS and CG-CAHPS.

What health consumers need is all of this data pulled together to support the care decisions that they need to make. Need a knee replacement? Wouldn’t it be great to understand the quality, price, and experience tradeoffs of one doctor or surgical center versus another? Maybe you’re willing to pay more to be pampered? On the other hand, maybe you’re willing to deal with an unpleasant doctor if the price is right?

But for that core question – does this give consumers what they need for price transparency? The answer is still no. This is a big step forward albeit one that’s likely to change and evolve before going into force next year. At the end of the day, this step on the road to price transparency still fails to get to what consumers really want – their expected out of pocket costs.

Additional resources on price transparency rules:

• Final rule from HHS: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cms-1717-f2.pdf
• CMS fact sheet: https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/cy-2020-hospital-outpatient-prospective-payment-system-opps-policy-changes-hospital-price
• Whitehouse statement: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-delivering-promise-make-healthcare-prices-transparent/

It’s typical for hospitals and healthcare systems to invest in a digital patient education system, or syndicated health library on a website. A health library provides clinically reviewed patient education from a trustworthy source to your site visitors. It can help your patients understand health topics and take part in their care for better outcomes. Health library content is not brand-specific content developed by your internal writing team, but it can work successfully with your content.

Value of a Health Library

Use your health library to educate patients whenever they engage with your organization. Your health library can serve as:

• Personalized education during a patient’s appointment
• Access to health information during a patient portal visit
• Research and education resource during a website session

Website Approach

Effective integration of a health library can add significant value to your website and give your organization a competitive advantage by:

• Attracting new patients
• Boosting your brand’s trustworthiness
• Building patient loyalty and retention
• Delivering evidence-based health content
• Influencing health and wellness, behavior change, and condition management (population health management)

One of the keys to gaining value from your health library content is to make it a natural part of the patient journey. Connect it to the rest of your website presence rather than siloing it. This critical task may fall to you as a healthcare marketer or digital strategist.

Health Library Engagement

Take on the task of linking your website content with your health library proactively. Launching health library access on your organization’s website and then waiting for visitors to find and use it doesn’t initiate consumer engagement or generate enough traffic to justify the investment.

Promoting awareness of your health library through other channels may increase traffic, but it won’t enhance your user experience and translate into loyalty. After all, internet users can get free, reliable health information from popular sites like WebMD, National Institutes of Health, MedlinePlus, or Mayo Clinic. They don’t have to visit your website to learn about health topics or specific symptoms and conditions.

At this point, you may be wondering:

• How can we get our money’s worth out of a health library?
• How can a health library help us answer user questions and build trust with our target audiences?
• What should we do to make our health library a valued and seamless part of our website?

Follow our strategic approaches to achieve these goals.

Provide Seamless User Experience to Patients

Start by focusing on content, which helps you meet your organization’s goals and website users’ needs at the same time. Develop your content strategy with a seamless patient experience and content integration in mind.

Depending on your health library provider and license, your integration plans could use patient education in the following ways:

• Link conditions and treatments in page copy (especially on service line pages) to health library topics
• Enhance your in-house service line content pages by embedding content on the page
• Serve as your service line content in your branded format (Requires appropriate licensing with your health information vendor)
• Populate dynamic content (SmartPanels for VitalSite clients) to give users convenient access to:
  • Related health library content to complement your medical services on service line pages
  • Service line providers who specialize in the care and related service line events while viewing health library pages
• In the form of quizzes, interactive tools, and symptom checkers to evaluate and decide on next steps to seeking care and treatment or living a healthy lifestyle
• Embed videos or illustrations showing elective or common medical procedures

Content Unification

When your health content focuses on what your website visitors want to know, your organization will benefit from satisfied customers. Your health library will make sure you deliver:

• Easy to access patient education information
• Accurate explanations of conditions, treatments, and services
• Interactive involvement and management of personal health and wellness
• Reliable, up-to-date health information content

Let Us Help

Contact the Geonetric team if you need help creating a customized health library integration strategy for your hospital website.

That’s why considering your form’s voice and tone, error messages, security experience, and transparency are so important to the user experience (UX). And that UX carries over into trust and recognition of your brand, driving present and future conversions.

Here are five ways you can connect with users through your forms.

1. Speak their language – plain language, that is

Whether through error messages, labels, or tooltips in your forms, speak the language of your audience. Most of the time, that’s plain language – or writing so your audience can understand it the first time they read it.

Error messages are a great example. There might be a technical reason a form didn’t submit, but does technical jargon have any meaning to someone using your form? Or does it aid them in fixing the problem? Probably not.

When writing form directions, labels, error messages, and tooltips, keep proven web writing best practices in mind – use plain language written at an eighth-grade reading level, give helpful descriptions, and when there is a problem, provide constructive advice so users can them fix it.

2. Keep form fields in a single column

There’s something quite annoying about having to scroll left and right on your mobile device to see the whole of a screen. This happens most with forms that aren’t responsive or have too many columns of fields.

Best practice dictates that a single column form experience is best for keeping information linear. It removes barriers that can cause cognitive load – the psychology phrase used to describe “the amount of working memory resources.” Think of it like your computer running slow because too many applications are open.

Cognitive load has a lot to do with how we use the web and interact with tasks, and the more barriers in our way, the less likely we are to complete something. The same goes for your users.

Single column forms help eliminate that load, focusing the mind on one line, one field, at a time. It also plays nicely with mobile devices and smaller screen sizes.

3. Tell them why you’re asking for information

Forms can already be a chore to fill out, so if you’re asking for information that people aren’t sure they need to give you, the least you can do is explain why.

Information like birthdays, zip codes, and phone numbers may be needed for more detailed forms, but if you’re trying to get someone to sign-up for your email marketing, is it needed?

If you decide that, yes, you need that information, it’s best practice to let the user know why, especially if it’s not immediately clear. An easy-to-reach tooltip – a clickable icon or button that displays helpful text to users – can come in handy. For example, if it’s an email sign-up asking for a user’s birthday, use a tooltip to explain that you’ll customize content and preventative information based on their age.

Likewise, if you don’t have to ask for this information – skip it. It’s best practice to only ask for the information you need, not the nice-to-have information. Asking someone to complete a form is asking for their time and attention, so only require the information that’s most pertinent to their stage of the journey.

4. Highlight each field individually

You probably spend your time online with more than one window open, right? So do your users. That means their attention is divided between your form, a store shopping cart, their grocery list, and any other tasks they’re doing online.

To help them stay focused and complete the form, enable autofocus on your form fields.

What is autofocus? Autofocus uses a different appearance or color to focus the user’s attention on one field at a time, usually the field that’s next on the form. This allows users to pay closer attention to the information you’re asking, rather than feeling like they have to wander their eyes around the screen to see what to do next.

Like single-column forms, autofocused fields lower the chance of cognitive load. They also help users relying on screen readers or assistive tools to navigate the web more easily complete your form.

5. Make sure your form is accessible and inclusive

Accessibility is less about making something accessible to differently-abled bodies, and more about making sure your experience is inclusive to all.

With forms, it’s easy for things to get inaccessible very quickly. So if you want to deliver an inclusive experience for your form users, follow these guidelines:

• Enable autofill options, which relies on previously input information on a device to complete the same fields of your form
• Make autofocus and plain language a part of your form development every time to make it easier for all people to complete your form
• Build single-column forms when possible to avoid cognitive load and make it easier for all people to use
• Keep form field labels and instructional or example text outside the form field – don’t use placeholder text, if you can avoid it
• Ensure your forms are keyboard accessible, which includes tab-through options, enter-for-submit commands, and the ability to complete the entire form without the use of a mouse

Not sure where else your form should be accessible? Check out the AAA standards for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to get up to date.

Apply those best practices

Online forms are a critical part of your web presence. If you want help optimizing your forms and improving conversions, our UX experts can help. And if you’re in the market for a new form builder, one that’s built specifically for healthcare websites, you should check out Formulate. Sign up for demo today!