Content marketing is an engaging, reliable way to answer everyday health questions, from how to treat a nasty cold to tips for living a heart-healthy lifestyle.

There’s no doubt it’s effective. However, it also takes incredible resources, something many lean hospital marketing teams just don’t have. Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how the right partner can enable your organization to leverage content marketing efforts in a scalable way, helping you grow your brand, your audience, and your patient base.

You’ll learn:

• Trends in healthcare content marketing — who’s doing it, what’s stopping the rest, and why it matters to today’s consumers and patients
• Why SEO and keyword research help you tap into who your audience is and what matters to them
• Why governance standards — including style guides, editorial calendars, core strategy statements, and workflows — can help align your team and brand goals
• The importance of sharing your content everywhere: email newsletters, on your homepage, through social channels, and more
• How a partner can help you do all of this, plus measure your success and provide metrics to keep you moving forward

Health systems are competing for the ability to meet consumers in their moments of need — what Google calls “micro-moments” — those moments when a consumer turns to his or her device to know, go, do, or buy. Are you better than your competitors at winning these micro-moments? If you’re not sure, these situations may sound familiar:

“We primarily rely on service-line leaders, executives, and other team members to tell us what they’re hearing from patients and others in the community about what our competitors are doing and how their programs compare.”

“My team and I run across new functionality every now and then while visiting competitor sites, but we don’t formally document it.”

“Our patient advisory groups share competitive information. So we generally know what our competition is up to.”

While helpful, anecdotal information isn’t enough to prove what your competitors are offering in the digital space. You need to use cold, hard data as the basis for producing a thoughtful assessment of where you stand in relation to the competition, especially if you need this data to help prove the need for an increase in budget or team size. You also need a logical and effective way to organize competitive information to help you convey it most effectively to stakeholders.

This is where a digital competitive analysis comes in.

Set Yourself Up for Success with a Digital Competitive Analysis

A digital competitive analysis provides valuable insight into current initiatives that help to improve performance, evolve digital marketing strategies, and gain actionable insight that can help you achieve both short- and long-term goals. And, it provides a framework for presenting information in a clear way that will resonate with leadership. No more relying on anecdotal evidence alone!

You may be thinking: Using competitive information to inform your digital strategies, even while rooted in data, is just fodder for keeping up with the proverbial Joneses. It can seem this way on the surface, and your goals and objectives absolutely need to align organizationally and shouldn’t be determined solely based on what your competitors are doing. But without a deep understanding of your competitors’ digital strengths and weaknesses as well as your own, you’re missing critical information that’s likely leaving a hole in your strategies and resulting in a digital roadmap that may be off-course.

In addition to gleaning actionable insights about how your competitors are reaching consumers and patients in the same markets — and how effectively — your analysis can serve as a benchmark by which you can review your performance going forward. In general, a digital competitive analysis can help you understand the following in relation to your competitors:

• How your channel mix compares
• How much traffic your site receives vs. your competition
• Functionality differences
• Overall user experience
• Team size and roles comparison
• Where you’re ahead of the pack
• Where you’re behind
• Areas for improvement
• Opportunities for or threats to patient acquisition or retention that require short- and/or long-term strategies and action

So let’s say one of your direct competitors has a robust email marketing effort to support their cancer program, for example — complete with a variety of different e-newsletters, some even personalized to individual preference, as well as drip campaigns that guide subscribers through different stages of the cancer patient journey. If cancer is one of your key service lines but you’re not sending email of any kind related to that particular service line, or you are but not as comprehensively, that’s a potential threat.

Here’s another scenario: If your competitors offer online appointment scheduling while you’re only offering an appointment request form that requires a call back to the patient, that is also a threat. Your competitors have set a new benchmark for convenience in your market, and that’s critical for you to understand as you formulate both short- and long-term strategies and assign budget. Based on this, you might prioritize talking with operations and IT about developing a process for managing online appointment scheduling over and above other potential strategies so you can make the move sooner rather than later.

Also, you may find through your analysis that most of your competitors are using a broader mix of digital marketing channels than you are, and that information can help you make a case for an increase in budget or team size in order to become more competitive.

Data presented in a visually compelling way can help executives see the need for new functionality that they otherwise may have overlooked in favor of other initiatives. If you’ve had trouble getting leadership on board to support new online initiatives that others in your market are already offering, being able to show that — and speak to how that’s increased consumer expectations that you’re not meeting — can be incredibly powerful.

Competitive Analysis Steps

It’s easier to conduct an analysis and report out on the results than you may think, but it will still take time and resources. Follow these steps:

Once you have all of this information collected, it’s time to start your analysis. A simple and effective way to approach and structure an analysis is to use the traditional SWOT framework (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). I also recommend creating charts to show how you compare to your competitors in functionality and channel usage. A simple table format that has different digital functionality noted across the top and your organization and your competitors listed down the left-hand side marked with Xs to indicate who offers what, is an easy way to compile results. The resulting visual quickly showcases either how far ahead or how far behind your organization is in each area.

From there, you can then take the time to review results and assess each channel and functionality to gain deeper, more meaningful insights that will help you flesh out your SWOT analysis. Once you have your general findings compiled, you can follow a format like this to produce a formal report:

• Background/Purpose
• Competitors
• Overall findings (consider reporting out by Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats)
• Conclusions
• Sources
• Appendices for supporting data

Once completed, you’ll be well-positioned to share your analysis with your larger team, boss, key stakeholders, and decision makers. And, you’ll have baseline data you can use to benchmark your performance and progress against both yourself and competitors at whatever frequency makes sense for your organization.

Meeting Consumers in their Micro-Moments

A digital competitive analysis is just one tool in your arsenal, but an often-overlooked one that can help you better meet consumers in their micro-moments and help you change the perception of your department as a cost center to one that’s focused on improving the top and bottom lines. And that is worth all the time and effort you’ll put into it.

Geonetric helps healthcare systems and hospitals stay on top of digital trends, develop strategies, and measure results. We produce digital competitive analyses for clients, and we can help you too! Contact us today.

Amazon. Apple. CVS Health. As leaders in using data, technology, and consumer marketing to disrupt their fields, it’s clear these organizations will have some impact on how community hospitals and health systems design online experiences.

Watch this webinar and learn the top digital marketing trends to watch for in 2019. We’ll break down some of the intriguing moves in the industry and how you can use data, technology, and user experience to:

• Focus on consumers through A/B testing, personalization, and multi-channel digital campaigns
• Stay-up-to-date with guidelines and exceed consumer expectations around pricing transparency and accessibility
• Build designed experiences using the latest technology such as AI and chatbots, as well as deepening integrations across the technology stack
• Understand changes in the search space and how to leverage voice and location-based search to stand out in a crowded market

The best place to start when considering the implications of voice search on your hospital or healthcare system’s marketing strategy is to understand how it’s being used today and why. Here are a few statistics:

• 55% of teens use voice search daily (Google)
• 41% of adults use voice search daily (Google)
• 30% use voice search to obtain faster results (MindMeld)
• 24% use voice search when it’s difficult to type on a smart phone or other devices (MindMeld)

In general, the primary reason why people use voice search boils down to one common theme: convenience. And that convenience factor is underscored by the types of voice searches people are doing today. While some use voice search for entertainment, to shop, or to switch off their lights or operate in-home devices, the vast majority of voice searches are related to information retrieval . Which is not surprising given our expectation for immediate information and answers – those “micro-moments,” a term coined by Google, where we turn to our devices to know, go, do or buy.

And of these informational searches – these micro moments -, more than half involve finding something local. In fact, Bright Local reports that 58 percent of consumers have used voice search to find local information within the last year.

Drive Patients in Your Doors with Local Listings & Featured Snippets

Bottom-of-the-funnel searches – searches where consumers are looking to take immediate action – represent the best opportunity for hospitals and health systems to win in the voice search space today. Specifically, both local listings and featured snippets offer an opportunity to convert consumers to patients.

Since healthcare has largely caught up to other industries in understanding the value of and devising strategies and tactics around text-based search engine optimization (SEO), there’s a good chance you’ve already taken steps that positively impact voice searches without even realizing it. But that’s not to say that your current SEO and content strategy won’t need some adjusting.

So let’s take a look at each opportunity more closely:

1) Local listings

The most popular digital assistants – Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, Apple Siri, and Samsung Bixby – use Google, Bing, or Yelp – or a combination of – to return local information. For example, when someone asks Google for the closest urgent cares to them, Alexa responds with information it pulls from Yelp to return “popular” results, Siri uses Google, and Microsoft relies on Bing.

So, good news! All that time and effort you’ve been spending to claim and optimize your local listings has been time well spent.

The not so good news? If you haven’t claimed your listings on any other platform than Google My Business, you likely won’t show up in voice search results for voice assistants that use Bing or Yelp – or the information returned about your organization may be incomplete or inaccurate. So you’ll want to understand what devices are being used most often in your market and devise a plan to tackle other voice search sources, such as Bing Places for Business and Yelp, as next steps.

When it comes to voice search, ensuring your organization is optimized across multiple data sources can mean the difference between business walking through your doors or your competitors’.

2) Featured snippets

The efforts you’ve put into optimizing your service line and other content for SEO can also result in opportunities to garner what’s called a Featured Snippet spot on Google.

Featured snippets are blocks of text that appear at the top of Google search results (Fig. 2).

Not only is this very valuable search real estate, but it’s also a huge asset for voice search visibility. Featured snippets are often what voice assistants read as answers to users’ questions. They can appear as text, lists, tables and video, but currently most voice answers (about 65 percent) come from text-only featured snippet results.

To snag a featured snippet spot, it’s important to understand that people search differently using their voice than when using traditional typed searches. Voice search is more conversational, using longer phrases and complete sentences. Because of this difference, it’s important to research how people talk about the questions they have, and then shift how you write your content slightly to answer those questions.

However, we DO NOT recommend you start rewriting all of your existing content! Dip your toe in the featured snippets water by conducting small experiments and see what kinds of results you get.

We DO recommend you:

• Focus primarily on opportunities around bottom-of-the-funnel searches, where you have greater potential for visibility. Competing with Mayo Clinic, WebMD, and other similar organizations with nation-wide reach and authority and who are most likely to appear for top of the funnel searches, may not be worth your time (unless you offer a very unique service). However, search is of course always changing so you’ll definitely want to stay on top of trends. What doesn’t work today may work in the future!
• Always make sure your efforts are tied to strategy; there’s nothing worse than spending time and effort to grab a featured snippet spot about bunions when your organization really wants to drive knee surgeries.
• Keep in mind that you’re more apt to snag a featured snippet spot if you already rank on the first page of search results for a particular phrase or keyword.
• Use the “People Also Ask” results in Google, which are pulled from voice searches, to help you understand what content people are searching for. Including these phrases in your content could help you show up in voice search results.

Bottom Line: The Best Approach is a Strategic One

When it comes to voice search, the best approach is a strategic one. Keep your efforts focused on your overall organization and marketing goals. Don’t try to take on too much at once – start with a focus on local listings – then experiment a bit with featured snippets and see what kind of results you get.

It’s also helpful to try out the different voice-enabled devices on the market today to get a feel for how answers are returned. Interacting with them is also a great way to remove unknowns and reduce anxiety if you’re feeling overwhelmed (plus, it’s fun and definitely entertaining). Keep tabs on what your competitors are doing in the voice search space, and read up on the latest information – including additional posts – this is a fast-moving space!

Above all, remember that voice search is just another part of your overall SEO and content strategy, not a separate initiative. That alone will help you keep voice search where it belongs – in perspective. Good luck! Let us know how it goes.

Geonetric helps health care systems and hospitals stay on top of digital trends, and we’d love to help your organization, too! For guidance on voice search or other digital marketing trends, contact us.

For healthcare marketers, the “Health” category is a perfect starting point to browse to see what kind of topics people are searching, from the past hour to the past five years.

For example, after actor and comedian Robin Williams’ untimely death in 2014, Williams’ widow wrote about his suicide as a possible result of Lewy body dementia in a neurology journal. Searches spiked for the condition. For healthcare content marketers, it was an opportunity to answer patient questions and concerns around a rare, previously silent condition.

You can even sort Google Trends by category, or just browse the top-hit news as of late. Curious what was trending nearly 20 years ago? No worries — Google Trends offers a look at trending topics as far back as 2001.

Google Trends and Healthcare Topics

While Google Trends is a great place to see what’s going on around the world — what interests other people have, what topics are trending and why, what’s making headlines, and so on — it’s also a valuable place to harvest ideas for healthcare content marketing.

You can even take it a step further. While the image below is nationwide healthcare topics, you can whittle down the healthcare topics of interest in your city, county, or region with ease directly in the tool. You can also take advantage of keyword comparisons in Google Trends, to see which terms better resonate with your audience and target demographic.

Blog articles, Infographics, and More

First and foremost, Google Trends is a great place to capitalize on blog topics and categories. Whether you tie your blogs directly to topics, or reference topics to brainstorm new ideas, Trends is a handy launch pad if you’re stumped. HubSpot’s blog idea generator may be a good bookmark to keep close by to help get your creative juices flowing.

Taking the “ketogenic diet” Trends screenshot example from above, as a healthcare content marketer, I could build blogs or articles about the following:

• Ask the Expert: The Pros and Cons of the Ketogenic Diets
• Infographic: Differences Between Ketogenic Diet and Whole30
• Recipes: The Best Keto-friendly Cookie Recipes (They Do Exist!)
• Listicle: 5 Tips for Starting the Ketogenic Diets
• Patient Story: How to Manage a Ketogenic Diet with Chronic Conditions

Videos and Podcasts

Video marketing is on the rise, now becoming one of the preferred media for younger generations to access information. They’re especially popular on mobile devices.

The post-Millennial generation, known as Generation Z, has taken to video like ducks to water. Today, nearly 85 percent of today’s teens use YouTube, from engaging with their favorite brands to following video influencers, or even creating their own unique content.

On the audio-only front, podcasts are only a click away for most people thanks to apps like Spotify and Apple Music, especially on mobile devices. If you can find the time to create podcasts, audio interviews, or other video- and audio-friendly content, take the leap and tap into these popular media.

Revisiting the ketogenic diet example from above, how could we turn this into video or audio content for our audience? Take a look:

• Podcast (doctor interview): Keto Diet’s Impact on the Body
• Podcast (dietician interview): Is the Keto Diet Right for Me?
• Video: Keto & Coffee — Best and Worst Options for Keto Dieters
• Video: 3 Easy Keto-friendly Breakfast Recipes for Success
• Video: 5 Great Exercises to Assist Your Keto Diet Success

Social Posting

Tie your video, audio, blogging, and other formats (i.e., infographics) to your social campaigns. Post often. Use trending hashtags (also available on Twitter) to tie your audiences together with topics that interest them today.

• Twitter – #MotivationMonday tips to kickstart your keto diet
• Facebook – #RecipeWednesday has what you need for your #ketogenic meal this week

If juggling social posting and content marketing into your other marketing priorities seems overwhelming, create an editorial calendar to establish a cadence and to-do list for communicating with your social audiences.

Google Trend Topics Can Be Evergreen

In the summer of 2016, Pokemon Go! was sweeping the nation. This interactive smartphone game gave opportunities for families and kids alike to play outdoors and bring movement into their daily life. In response, I wrote a blog for Geonetric.com about how health systems can get involved with the craze by launching family-centric Pokemon hunts in their courtyards and playgrounds.

Good idea? Sure. But since then, Pokemon Go! has lost its viral steam. Instead, an article on overall mobile gaming experiences as a leap-pad to bring families to your hospital and inspire healthy, family-friendly events would be a better fit for evergreen content. Lesson learned.

As a healthcare content marketer, you know evergreen content is some of the best content you can have — it doesn’t age quickly and requires little upkeep. As you write content around trending topics, consider how your content options can be evergreen, too, by altering the direction or focal point of your article, rather than on the trending topic. Take a few tips when you want to keep your blog content evergreen:

• Avoid specific date references – months and years, especially. These take the shine off the topic, even if it’s evergreen, because it looks dated.
• Stay away from too many “currently trending” pop culture topics. References to memes, viral videos, or even trending celebrity news and gossip has a short shelf life in today’s on-the-go world, so it’s best to steer clear.
• If the topic you’re writing about is specific to this moment or topic in time, consider how can “zoom out” to a broader topic for longer-lasting content.

More than anything, Google Trends can deliver great content ideas right to your doorstep. Take a few minutes, poke around, jot some ideas, and see if it’s the kick in the pants you need to crank up your content marketing.

Learn how UNC Health Care used extensive web analytics and stakeholder feedback to create a comprehensive location strategy, with special attention paid to UNC Health Care’s specialty clinics. You’ll see first-hand how this new strategy delivered location pages that offer better user experience, are more relevant to local searches, and comply with accessibility standards. You’ll also learn tips for how to invest in a locations strategy that will set your organization up for future success – even as patients’ search motivations evolve.

Watch this free webinar and learn how to:

• Use data from Google Analytics, heatmapping, scrollmapping, site search, and stakeholder surveys to create a comprehensive strategy for your locations.
• Make decisions about content strategy, design, and functionality that balances consumer expectations and the needs of your organization.
• Create a strategy to improve your organization’s competitiveness in local search, while reducing the internal competition among your own locations.

Consider potential trade-offs between page speed performance and features benefiting your users. Always look at your website holistically and make intentional, informed decisions.

How Does Page Speed Impact My Rankings?

Mobile-First Indexing led many people to look at their page load speeds — and fear that the change could hurt their ability to rank high on search engine result pages (SERPs). However, the reality is more nuanced; consider this guidance directly from Google that went into effect in July 2018.

“…The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries [emphasis added]. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content. We encourage developers to think broadly about how performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics.”

So, site speed is not as significant a factor in rankings as many digital marketers anticipated. Google is emphasizing improving the “slowest experiences” — what it calls out as a “small percentage of queries.” As it turns out, page speed measurement is not the universal equally-applied benchmark many supposed it would be.

The driving force behind Google’s focus on page speed? Promoting and improving UX on its platform. Tying page speed to your SEO is a way for Google to get you to care about this too. Faster page load times is just one tactic Google has prioritized — and it’s the one getting the most attention.

This isn’t to say we should ignore page speed. If your page is unbearably slow to load, Google may demote your site in search engine rankings. But, if you have a generally well-performing site today, improving your page speed isn’t likely to boost your rankings. What helps your rankings and what hurts your rankings aren’t always the same things.

How Does Page Speed Impact User Experience?

Though it’s likely page speed isn’t impacting your rankings, it may affect your UX and other measures of success. If a page takes more than a few second to load, users may get frustrated and leave your site. Look into page speed if you see a high hard bounce rate or low conversions. Remember to think about how your users experience your site, instead of simply how the page performs.

Page speed is a measurement of how fast your page content loads — so users can see and interact with your content. Page speed can be affected by many things, from the user’s browser to server configuration and front-end script management. Page load times can vary dramatically from user to user.

Key Page Load Metrics

How do we evaluate “page load”? The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) reminds us that, “Load is not a single moment in time — it’s an experience that no one metric can fully capture. There are multiple moments during the load experience that can affect whether a user perceives it as ‘fast’ or ‘slow.'”

Let’s take a look at some of the UX metrics that can help us better understand our users’ perceptions.

• First Paint (FP): Measurement of how quickly something different shows up on the user’s screen — it could be a background color or some other relatively insignificant object. First Paint confirms something is happening and lets users know they’re on the right track. Users look for visual feedback to confirm their expectations are being met.
• First Meaningful Paint (FMP): Measurement of when the site becomes useful. At First Meaningful Paint, the most important page elements or “above the fold” main content have loaded (e.g., the most recent posts when you log in to Facebook), while less-important content is not yet visible (e.g., older Facebook news feed posts “below the fold”). Like with First Paint, the user has visual feedback that the page is working as expected. Google acknowledges that, “Web pages almost always have parts that are more important than others. If the most important parts of a page load quickly, the user may not even notice if the rest of the page doesn’t.”
• Time to Interactive (TTI): Measurement of how long it takes your page to be useable. This means that the user can fully interact with your page, as all of its elements are clickable, scrollable, etc.

Since TTI is how quickly the page is “fully loaded,” it’s closest to what many of us think of when we think of page load speed. However, the other two metrics are also important indicators of user experience. Users may perceive two pages with the same TTI differently if one page has a faster FP or FMP than the other.

Looking at the measurements above helps you focus on what matters most: your users’ perspective. Rather than being hyper-focused on page load speed for its own sake, broaden your view. Take time to determine how your site is actually working for your users. A single metric can’t tell the whole story of how your site is performing. Examine how multiple factors work together to influence your overall UX.

Happily, when you focus on improving UX, you also end up improving SEO. Slow time to First Paint may result in a high bounce rate, which can hurt your rankings. An “average” load time won’t directly impact your rankings. But if it creates frustration for your users, you’ll end up with a higher bounce rate and fewer conversions – and those things will impact SEO. Your goal should be to consider the user’s entire path, from First Paint through conversion, and remove all barriers to a satisfying experience.

What You Should Do

The reality is not all pages on your site are equally important to SEO or UX. Your first step is to determine which pages are crucial to your UX or SEO efforts — and be aware of the pages that aren’t.

For example, many marketers note that search results pages take longer to load than other pages on their sites. Search results pages display dynamic content – personalized content that changes based on the user’s preferences or actions. Dynamic content inherently takes longer to load than static content, which is delivered to every user in the same way every time. Your performance expectations should take this into account. Further, you’re probably not driving traffic, especially organic traffic, to a search page — or trying to boost its rankings. So, although your search results pages may be some of your longer loading pages, they’re not as important to your SEO efforts. You’ll get more value out of focusing your attention on pages where you attract targeted organic traffic.

As websites become increasingly robust, you have more options for features that can enhance a user’s experience. Consider trade-offs between page load and site features to find the best balance for your audience. For example, advanced “Find a Doctor” search options can return results based on the provider’s distance from a user’s location and other significant selection criteria. The upside is clear: Users can narrow search results to providers that meet their exact needs. The downside? Results take longer to load because providing the dynamic interaction is process-intensive.

For example, many news-related websites can have noticeable page loads. On mobile, the New York Times homepage does not appear fully-loaded instantaneously. Rather, a user is likely to first see activity in a browser’s progress bar, next seeing the homepage top text appear, followed by the top image’s appearance before the user is able to interact with the page (see images). Although it has a slower overall load experience, the site is providing users with many visual indicators of active progress throughout which reinforces user expectations.

Focus on optimizing for your user’s entire experience — balancing speed performance with what your audience wants or needs to accomplish. Users won’t be satisfied if they get information quickly, but that information isn’t helpful.

Once you determine which pages matter most, you can study those pages’ load times using tools such as:

• Pingdom’s Website Speed Test — Allows you to identify individual page elements and their responsiveness
• Google’s PageSpeed Insights — Provides optimization suggestions specific to your page

For pages you’re concerned about, identify what’s affecting load performance. Frequent culprits include image management, script management, and browser caching. Then you can search for ways to address those root issues.

Next, the tough part — weighing your options. How meaningful is the impact of your potential solution? What trade-offs to other performance indicators might you have? Answers to questions like these can help you decide if a solution is worth pursuing.

Still Have Questions?

The truth about page speed and its impact on your site’s performance is complex. If you’re interested in looking into your site’s UX, page load speeds, or other metrics, know that Geonetric can help. From identifying the pages you should focus on to meaningfully measuring their performance, Geonetric is able to help develop strategies and tactics to enhance your site.

CMS’s stated intent is to make information more widely available in an attempt to empower consumers to make better decisions when they seek healthcare. This includes providing information to compare competing care-delivery options as well as reducing unexpected high bills after receiving medical services.

While providers have made great strides in increasing their transparency in the areas of quality and experience, pricing transparency has been a far more difficult problem to solve. As a result, CMS is requiring the following initial step (emphasis added):

“…effective January 1, 2019, we are updating our guidelines to require hospitals to make available a list of their current standard charges via the internet in a machine readable format and to update this information at least annually, or more often as appropriate. This could be in the form of the chargemaster itself or another form of the hospital’s choice, as long as the information is in machine readable format.”

The final rule includes significant insight from the comment period, particularly around a number of issues where CMS asked for feedback in the proposed rule. In addition, CMS has put together a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document to help us understand what’s required for hospitals.

• You must publish the information from the hospital’s current standard charges from its chargemaster.
• This information should be updated at least yearly or more often as appropriate.
• They understand the limitations of the usefulness of chargemaster data. Hospitals are welcome to provide more actionable information for consumers such as out-of-pocket cost calculators in addition to the required chargemaster information.
• The information is required to be in a machine readable format. CMS has not proposed a specific format or file structure to use but has made it clear that a PDF is not acceptable.
• There does not appear to be any requirement that this is presented in a human readable format. CMS, in fact, suggests some formats such as XML which are often difficult for consumers to view.
• Publishing this information through some other platform, as occurs in several states with their own transparency initiatives, does not satisfy the new CMS requirements nor does collaborative efforts with payers to improve pricing transparency.
• No hospitals in the United States are exempted from these requirements.

CMS questions the viewpoint that, for many, chargemaster data is not only irrelevant, but publishing such data is likely to create greater confusion among health consumers. However, they do encourage health systems to take steps above and beyond the new requirements.

With this in mind, CMS suggests that future steps are likely: “We also are considering other potential actions that would be appropriate…to further our objective of having hospitals undertake efforts to engage in consumer-friendly communication of their charges to help patients understand what their potential financial liability might be for services they obtain at the hospital, and to enable patients to compare charges for similar services across hospitals.”

What Do We Need To Do To Comply?

By January 1, 2019, all U.S.-based hospitals must make a machine readable file of their standard charges available on the internet.

No format is specifically defined, but the regulations do mention XML and CSV file formats as acceptable and PDF files as unacceptable.

The file must include “…a list of the hospital’s standard charges for items and services provided by the hospital, including for diagnosis-related groups established under section 1886(d)(4) of the Social Security Act.”

There are no requirements about the naming of this file or where it should be located. There is also no guidance as to whether this file must be available from your primary web presence, a microsite, or some other online platform — only that it is available on the internet.

Remember, these new regulations go into effect on January 1, 2019! If you have questions, you should consult your organization’s legal counsel.

Like any other advertising medium, it’s important to be intentional with your efforts. Paid search campaigns allow you to track precise return on investment (ROI). Likewise, without effective creation and management, it’s easy to overspend and underperform.

Download this white paper and learn ways to enhance your campaign efforts, including:

• What’s really key about your keyword research (hint: it’s more than just understanding your organic traffic, but that’s a great start!)
• How to establish the right goals
• How to best take advantage of added features like dynamic keyword insertion
• Why you should be using ad scheduling
• When to let Google help with things like bidding strategies and ad serving – and when to do it yourself