Email is the most popular channel in terms of daily use and consumer preference for both marketing and personal communication. And, according to Salesforce, 73% of marketers agree that email marketing is core to their business. That’s because emails are easy to produce and distribute, and more cost effective than traditional marketing. Plus, emails allow you to target specific audiences and link visitors to relevant information on your website, driving engagement and achieving a higher return on investment.

Watch this video to learn how you can use email marketing for everything from educating patients on health topics to driving service line volume. We’ll also show real examples and offer tips for improvement.

That said, I spend lots of time researching and testing provider directories and I’ve noticed two things that the most successful ones tend to have in common.

1. Successful provider directories use search strategically.

The way your organization uses search in your provider directory should have a lot to do with the size of your organization. In fact, creating the optimal provider directory is as much art as it is science and varies a great deal based on the size of your organization, the number of providers represented, the geographic footprint served, and the data you have available.

Let’s look at how size makes a difference when it comes to provider directory search.

Smaller medical groups like Midwest Orthopedic Specialty Hospital offer an opportunity to streamline the experience by eliminating the need to search and making it easy to “dive deep” into the provider’s information.

Whereas the smaller groups can streamline and even eliminate search, large medical groups need options.

Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare offers three different ways to search depending on what a site visitor needs. While a health system with fewer providers should keep it simple, having a large medical staff means offering ways to focus and drill down.

You may want to include ways to filter the search results you receive like they do at Abington Jefferson Health.

In addition to size, it’s important to consider the different ways visitors use your provider directory. When someone searches for a provider by name, they likely have a relationship with that provider, so take them right to the profile.

When a visitor searches by specialty, they are probably looking for a new provider. Help them evaluate options by including lots of information in the search results page.

Wheaton Franciscan does a great job showcasing what providers offer night and weekend hours.

2. Successful provider directories invest in doctor profiles.

The provider profile is a great place to humanize your doctors.

In fact, offering compelling and engaging online provider profiles is one of the best ways to showcase your doctors in a unique and genuine way. A great place to invest: doctors’ biographies.

Bios should be more than just a name and a degree. You want to give health consumers the kind information that will allow them to make a good choice.

This example from Bronson Healthcare does a great job of building out the doctor’s profile, and showcases his approach to care, credentials, and videos.

Midwest Orthopedic includes videos and other elements to showcase the doctor’s passions and skills.

One size does not fit all.

There’s no one way to build the perfect provider directory and it may take some experimentation to find the one that’s right for you. But if you focus on the two key areas of search and provider profiles, you’ll be well on your way to building a provider directory that works for your site visitors.

To learn more about promoting your physicians’ online and see more examples of great provider directories in practice, check out our eBook or learn more about how we’ve solved these challenges with our provider directory software.

If you plan to implement physician ratings and reviews on your website, there are some things you need to make sure you have in place before you go live. Getting these things taken care of will ensure that your physician ratings and reviews are trusted by site visitors and provide tangible value to your organization.

1. Link to the description of how the ratings and reviews are collected

Despite legislative mandates to publish it, consumers don’t necessarily trust the quality information provided on many hospital and government websites. For this reason, it’s imperative that if you’re considering adding ratings and reviews to your physician profiles, you provide a prominent means for visitors to access a description of how these ratings are solicited, acquired and published.

A quick survey of some of the better implementations shows how this is accommodated right on the physician profiles. Don’t forget to do this on your own!

2. Determine the threshold for publishing ratings and reviews

There’s nothing stopping you from publishing ratings as they come in, but try to avoid publishing a low number to a physician’s profile. Most organizations choose to start publishing ratings for a given physician only when they have accumulated a suitable number of ratings and reviews. For instance, The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) recently announced that they would start publishing physician ratings on their website and have decided that a given physician will need 30 reviews within 18 months before they will appear on the site. And they are not alone.

There are a number of reasons to do this, but two important ones stand out:

1. Having a physician with only one or two ratings can suggest to consumers that s/he is not popular with patients. Waiting to publish until their are a sufficient number of reviews avoids this.
2. Having only a few reviews can present a distorted view of the physician. A couple of low or high ratings (or positive/negative reviews) can skew the results significantly. Waiting for a statistically valid number of ratings and reviews ensures site visitors have a clearer, more useful and valid picture of the physicians.

3. Do not filter negative reviews

One of the largest issues hospitals, health systems, and physicians struggle with is the “What if?” scenario involving negative reviews. The fear about publishing negative reviews is often palpable. And it’s understandable. Most marketers have an instinctive drive to protect the brand, and are worried about publishing a negative review that reflects poorly on the physician, the organization, the system, etc…

Get over it.

If you are publishing physician ratings and reviews on your website, you have ethical and moral obligations to include the negative ones as well. There may even be legal implications to cherry-picking only the best ratings and reviews for publication.

Lets face it, negative reviews happen. And to some extent, consumers even expect to see a distribution of positive and negative reviews. But if you fear a huge deluge of negativity, you may be overreacting. As the Harvard Health Blog put it, “Studies suggest that most – between 65% and 90% – of online patient reviews are positive.” And it’s not just one study. A famous study from 2012 looked at third-party physician ratings websites and supports the same conclusion:

The study found that, on average, physicians received a quality rating of 3.93 out of 5. Nearly half received a perfect 5 rating.
–The Washington Post

If you do implement physician ratings only to discover that some physician reviews are overwhelmingly negative, it’s your opportunity to investigate, understand, and improve. That’s a much less frightening prospect for most marketers than letting negative reviews continue to spread by word of mouth or on third party websites, where they fester and damage the brand. At the end of the day, negative reviews may be your opportunity to identify and fix problems.

And of course, don’t forget to include some verbiage about publishing all your reviews, including negative ones, in your description about how ratings and reviews are collected and published.

4. Determine your response policy prior to having a problem

As touched on above, you should expect to get some amount of negative reviews…and it’s important to plan for how you’re going to handle these prior to launching ratings and reviews on your site. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to figure this out even if you aren’t launching ratings and reviews on your website. The fact is that your physicians are being reviewed elsewhere, and it’s a good idea to stay on top of this (see the Physician Promotion eBook for more on this).

I usually recommend organizations start by determining whether or not to let a negative rating or review stand on its own. Not every negative review deserves a response, but if it’s a path you want or need to tread, make sure you staff appropriately and figure out your approach before you have a problem. Some things you’ll want to figure out include:

• Identify who a response will come from. Consider patient advocates (or others in similar roles). Avoid having physicians personally respond. They need to focus on the work of healing and not on personally responding to negative reviews. Additionally, they are likely not experts in this domain and can easily make a bad situation worse.
• Be clear about what you want to accomplish in your responses. Be cautious if your goal is to counter and disprove every negative review. I recommend a touch-and-turn approach that reassures the audience that you’ve heard the problem and are invested in learning more about it offline. Be careful of language that seems to deny patients their own experience. Consider something like the following:
  • I’m sorry you did not have a positive experience at our hospital/office/clinic. I’d like to learn more about what happened and how we can better serve our patients. Would you mind contacting me at our patient advocate office so we can discuss? You can reach me at 555.555.5555. -Mary

Such verbiage lets the patient own his or her experience, shows readers that you’re listening and want to learn more, and moves the conversation offline and out of the public theater. These are all wins for your organization, and not just from a reputation management perspective. This type of follow-through can surface important opportunities for improvement that you might otherwise miss.

5. Establish a publication policy for reviews that contain PHI

Earlier in this post I covered the importance of not censoring negative reviews, and I suggested that once you go down the path of publishing ratings and reviews, you have an obligation to publish ALL reviews. While I stand by this advice, there is one important exception we need to allow for: reviews that contain personally identifiable health information (PHI).

When it comes to these, you have two options: editing out any PHI from reviews, or withholding such reviews from publication.

Both options come with complications you’ll have to work through. If you edit a review to remove PHI prior to publishing it, I submit that you have an obligation to disclose this fact when you publish the review. A simple, “This review has been edited to remove personally identifiable health information” may suffice. In your disclaimer you can even include a link to your complete explanation about how and under what conditions posts are edited.

The other option is to exclude from publication any post that contains PHI. If you go this route, you should disclose the fact that you aren’t publishing posts containing PHI. Readers deserve to know that they are getting only a subset of reviews when using them to evaluate physicians. And be warned, this approach may exclude a sizable number of reviews from your site.

Lastly, if you’re excluding reviews, you’ll need to figure out what you want to do with the corresponding ratings. If you’re removing a large number of reviews, but publishing the accompanying ratings, the ratio between ratings and reviews may look suspiciously unbalanced to prospective patients.

While there’s not one correct approach for every organization, you’ll need to plan on scrubbing personally identifying information from reviews. Some vendor solutions can even help with this through automation and workflows for your staff. And it’s really the only way to make the most out of your investment in publishing ratings and reviews on your site.

Next Steps

As you plan for physician ratings and reviews on your site, you’re going to have more questions and considerations. Check out the Physician Promotion eBook for more great resources on this. Or if you’re ready to work with someone who can help you understand your options and move forward, contact us.

That’s why Cone Health Medical Group decided to change the focus of their website and put the spotlight on their star players: their doctors and providers.

Building relationships between patients and providers

Taking a card-based design approach, they reinvented their provider search, connecting visitors with a more expansive business card-like view of physicians and providers, all while dispensing with the typical scrolling list.

Choose a provider (such as James David Allred, MD) and you’ll see a custom profile with elements that may include a biography, areas of interest, professional memberships, board certifications, and more. Many providers also include a high-quality image in their profile.

Connecting with users through content

Along with stunning provider profiles, Cone Health Medical Group also invested in a content strategy and development project with Geonetric, receiving engaging, patient-focused content that spoke not only to the medical services they offer, but the quality of care they provide.

Through the redesign, the organization continued to lay stepping stones to bring individual clinic websites under the Cone Health Medical Group umbrella.

Improving provider profiles leads to success

Investing in a quality physician directory is not only essential for effective physician marketing, but it can be a significant contributor to an organization’s bottom line. One need look no further than Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare (another Geonetric client). This forward-thinking organization recently invested in their provider directory and added user-friendly appointment forms as part of the project. The results? Their numbers soared.

With 140 primary care doctors offering online appointment requests, over 740 requests were brought in through the new system. Four hundred of those requests were new patients. This has resulted in outstanding downstream revenue for the organization.

If you’re ready to connect your providers and patients with an improved online experience, Geonetric can help. Reach out to us today and let us help you create a blueprint and a website for success.

Wrong. An intranet, like your external website, has a very specific audience and purpose. But it’s easy to fall into the trap of having your intranet be an online filing cabinet, where every department stores every bit of information.

To make sure your intranet stays valuable, here are a few tips to guide you when building or redesigning your intranet.

• Analyze the value of your content: Is the content on your intranet easy to find? Are you keeping decades old meeting minutes on your intranet? Think about the ROT approach to auditing your content. Is it redundant, outdated or trivial? If it’s one or more of those things, it’s time to find a home elsewhere than your intranet.
• Question what might be missing: You might throw out a lot of pages when doing a content audit, but you might also find content gaps. How are your employees using the intranet today? Common answers might be training, emergency preparedness, policy updates, and more. Are these items clearly labeled on your intranet, and is the information useful?
• Ask your audience: When thinking about how to organize your content assets, talking to your employees, executives and administrative teams is a great place to start. How are different groups using the intranet today, and what content matters most to them? Gathering input from your internal stakeholders with online surveys or face-to-face interviews is a great way to get this information.
• Write better, more engaging content: Great content is definitely important for your external website but you also need to ensure your employees are engaged with your intranet by making sure the content speaks to them. The same rules apply: Break up long text, consider bulleted lists to get points across, and if there’s an action to be taken, make sure it’s clear on the page.
• Integrate images and multimedia: To boost engagement on your intranet, consider adding images and videos of your organization and employees on relevant pages. Whether it’s a page about a wellness initiative, or information about patient care, images, videos and media can help strengthen the page purpose and message.

Of course, making your intranet responsive for all devices is always a plus, too. With more than 60% of American adults owning smart phones, it’s a great chance to ask your employees how a responsive intranet might help them when they’re working remotely or on the go.

To ensure you’re keeping track of your intranet’s use, add Google Analytics tracking code if possible. You’ll be able to track device usage, duration, events and engagement. Understanding how your employees are using the intranet gives you great insights as you plan improvements for the future.

If you’re thinking about taking your intranet to the next level, Geonetric can help. From content strategy to design, you’ll have an expert team to help you create an intranet that’s both engaging and informative. Let’s talk about the future of your organization’s intranet.

Seventy-two percent of Internet users say they look online for health information. Ensure your hospital’s website is a go-to resource by offering engaging health content that not only educates site visitors, but also converts them into patients. Join Ben Dillon from Geonetric and Rachelle Montano from StayWell and learn proven strategies to help you get the most value from your health library. You’ll see real examples of organizations that are delivering valuable health content across multiple channels to educate and engage health consumers.

Let’s set aside the technical aspect of creating and maintaining a WordPress blog for now and focus on the strategy of writing great content, getting physicians on board, and putting that content to work for your marketing goals.

Writing Great Content

While it may seem like finding the perfect design and setting up hosting for your blog are the main hurdles, the real work is consistently creating great content. In fact, some of the internet’s most popular blogs are lacking a strong design, but because of their content, they have become thought leaders in their market. Think of websites like Daring Fireball and even Seth Godin’s blog.

Great content does several things:

• It creates instant value for the audience by providing actionable information or an “Ah ha!” moment that makes the reader take the next step.
• It encourages (and seemingly demands) sharing. From Facebook to Twitter and even other related blogs, a single post or entire blog that gets shared can do more for your brand than paid advertising could ever hope.
• It is timely and matches what your audience is searching for at any given time. A post about spring allergies as winter comes to a close may be one example.

It’s also important to remember that content can take many forms. While a blog post is the most common, you can also include video, audio, photo galleries, infographics, and more on your blog.

In fact, a good blog includes some diversity to keep readers engaged. Keep your blog fresh with a variety of different content pieces.

Encouraging Physicians to Contribute

Helping physicians understand the importance of an activity like blogging can be a challenge, but many physicians are also savvy and understand the importance of this type of marketing. Finding those advocates in your organization is an important step towards making your blog a reality.

Help your physicians realize how the blog will position them as the expert. It’s their opportunity to showcase their expertise and be a helpful voice in the community. This alone could bring patients to their door or your organization as a whole.

The most critical step may be to set a publishing schedule and develop a schedule for your content. In addition to helping your physicians know when new content is needed (and who’s on deck to write), it also helps your audience know when to expect new content.

This structure will likely help you “sell” the idea to potential authors.

Setting Internal Expectations & Measuring Results

Building a blog is a longer-term project, to be sure. It’s important to set expectations with your physicians and internal contacts as it will take time for the blog to build an audience and begin delivering results.

Utilizing tools such as Google Analytics, you’ll be able to report back on traffic being generated by the blog. Plan to report back at least on a monthly basis.

From this important data, you may be able to tell your physicians which content is resonating the most, or take note of which websites send you the most traffic. All of this data will be useful in determining which content to create on a regular basis.

Remember, while it’s great to see traffic growth, also report on the impact their efforts are having on appointment requests and general awareness. You can measure these items through goals and funnels in Google Analytics or even using Event Tracking, another feature of Google Analytics.

An Example: Rush-Copley Pediatrics Blog

One example of an organization that built a blog and encouraged physicians to rally around the project is Rush-Copley. Their Kids Blog is written by multiple physicians who contribute to the content pile and building a strong brand for their pediatrics service line through content marketing.

Once a new post is created, Rush-Copley utilizes their various social channels to promote that post and gain some traction. Additionally, their posts are aligned with keyword research so users searching for help on common pediatrics questions will find their content.

If you spend some time on their blog (and you should!), you’ll find posts on various topics important to parents including dental care, flu season information, strep throat symptoms, and more.

You’ll notice several things about the Rush-Copley Kids Blog:

• The content on the blog is timely and answers questions for parents on many popular topics. It also doesn’t ask much of the visitor, but seeks to inform and build thought-leadership for the Rush-Copley physicians and brand.
• Each physician is featured prominently to showcase their expertise. Posts also include their biography and a link to all of their posts.
• They’ve tackled several topics, both large and small. If you think your physicians can provide value, there is no minimum or maximum when it comes to content creation.
• The blog is featured in the pediatrics section of their website. If users don’t necessarily need pediatric care right now, they’ll at least have a great resource available to them.

Next Steps

Now that you have some ideas for creating an awesome blog for your physicians, what is the first step?

Begin by talking to your web vendor about getting your blog set up, designed, and ready to add content. Be sure it is branded correctly and author profiles are added.

But don’t wait for these pieces to be done and ready. Start building your team of authors, including physicians, and have them begin brainstorming topics to write about.

Once all of the technical pieces are in place, begin adding content. As your posts go live, give them publicity on your social channels and encourage users to share the content with their networks as well. You may even feature your new blog on your homepage or relevant sections of your website.

You may also want to promote this new resource to patients in your own hospital and clinic buildings with signage. Take advantage of your new resource for patients and make it well-known whenever it makes sense to do so.

More Physician Promotion Ideas

Want more ideas for generating buzz around your physicians? Our Online Physician Promotion eBook features tactics for creating stronger online physician profiles, utilizing online paid advertising, and much more.

It’s free to download, and you can grab yours today.

Adding a health library on your website is an investment. But if it’s leveraged well and properly integrated into your website content, it can be a very powerful tool that acquires patients and provides a positive return on your investment.

The key is to make sure visitors are able to find your health library content at the exact moment that they want it.

For a great analogy, think about the product placement strategy at grocery stores.

Let’s say you and your family plan to go on a weekend camping trip. You have a million things to pull together and a list of “to do’s” running through your head. When the clock hits 5:00 p.m. on Friday, you race out of work to your local grocery store. You need two meals, snacks, firewood, sunscreen and bug spray. You have your shopping route planned, with a goal of making it a 15-minute stop.

First thing’s first: grab hotdogs. Great — right next to the hotdogs is a stand holding ketchup and mustard. You forgot you needed those. In the bread aisle, there’s a handy, plastic loaf-of-bread holder. Perfect for preventing smashed bread. You throw that in the cart, too. And the snacks are easy to find. Right at the end-cap, you grab marshmallows, graham crackers, chocolate bars and even roasting sticks. Cross that off the list. It’s like the store was ready for busy parents preparing for a camping trip!

The point of this analogy is that grocery stores are proactively putting their customer’s needs first — they place items together in an easy and convenient way. That’s how you should think about your health library.

Reaching Users at Perfect Places

How do you start? There are many places throughout your site that you can leverage your health library content.

• “Conditions We Treat” pages. Often, these pages have a bulleted list of conditions you treat. You can link each of these conditions to the correct topic or page in your health library to quickly give your site visitors more information about the services they seek.
• Service-line pages. Let’s say your heart section has a cardiac rehabilitation page, and your health library has articles about managing high blood pressure and ways to reduce stress — two things you learn about during cardiac rehab. You can link directly to those articles in your health library. Or, you may be able pull relevant information right onto your web page and display it in a right-column panel or below the text. (Geonetric clients who use VitalSite can do this using our content management system’s integration with Staywell.)
• Wellness resources. Is your organization shifting focus to a proactive wellness approach? In your wellness section, include links to health library recipes, healthy living tips or ways to stay active when you work at a desk.

(For more ideas, see our post “The Eight Steps of a Successful Health Content Library Integration.”)

The more you integrate your library, the better the experience for your site visitors.

How to Implement Health Library Integration

1. Identify places on your website to provide users with helpful information. Start by using Google Analytics to identify sections that get the most traffic, as well as pages that have low time-on-page results. Also find opportunities to provide content that aligns with your organization’s priorities, or content that connects with your current campaigns. A review of your site pages will help you determine content gaps and opportunities to integrate health library information.
2. Find related or supporting content in your health library. Search through the library so your site visitors don’t have to.
3. Determine how to integrate your health library content. You could link to your health library page from your CMS page. Or you could pull health library content directly onto your page. Depending on your ability to integrate, the health library content can look like it belongs right on the page, or it can direct site visitors to a new page or new section.
4. Track your efforts. Watch for patterns in user behavior. Use that data to make incremental changes to improve your content integration.

Interested in learning more about how to get the most value from your health library? View our webinar “Unleash the Power of Your Website’s Health Library” to see best practices in use at hospitals and learn integration tips and from Ben Dillon, our Chief Strategy Officer, and Rachelle Montano from Staywell.

Filling physician schedules is one of your top priorities. And with the majority of health consumers turning to the Web to find doctors and research treatments, promoting your doctors online is more important than ever. Watch this video and learn how to develop and implement effective tactics to engage potential patients online. You’ll learn tips for driving qualified visitors to your online provider directory, as well as how to create effective physician profiles, complete with engaging bios and strategic calls to action. Throughout this video you’ll see examples of successful online physician promotion and leave armed with ideas you can start implementing right away.

From Amazon to Netflix and beyond, consumers are increasingly accustomed to seeing evaluations of the goods and services they shop for. Often these take the form of an iconic star rating system that’s become the internet’s at-a-glance method of conveying user satisfaction (or other subjective measure) with the product at hand. But it’s not just for shoes and movies anymore. It’s also for your physicians.

Like it or not, the fact is that your physicians are already being rated and reviewed. In many cases, it’s off your website and on third-party sites where you have little to no control over what gets published. To add insult to injury, these third-party physician rating sites divert organic search traffic away from your own website and physician profile pages. That’s because Google knows that consumers value this information, and it rewards sites that provide it.

If your own website doesn’t publish physician ratings, you shouldn’t be surprised that others are earning your organic search traffic.

Clearly, ignoring the physician ratings trend is not an option. It’s time to embrace it and make ratings and reviews a prominent piece of your physician profiles. Doing this can have a number of benefits for organic SEO:

• Providing you use the correct semantic markup in your ratings, you may start to see your rating and review information appear in Google’s search results.
• As you collect more and more ratings and reviews and publish them to your profiles, Google may begin to rank your physician profiles higher in search results than the profiles on third-party websites that have fewer reviews.
• Updating your content — even if it’s just adding new reviews and ratings to your physician profiles as they become available — is a quality signal that can independently raise your search rank.

The result? Improved traffic from organic search. Increased engagement on your site. More appointments with your physicians.

How big of an SEO boost can you expect? Well, there are no guarantees, but after University of Utah Health Care implemented ratings and reviews they reported a significant increase in traffic from organic search and a near 280% increase in physician profile pageviews.

Remember, the research reveals that 77% of patients use search prior to booking an online appointment. It’s clear that because physician ratings can increase organic search performance and on-page engagement, they are a potent means of promoting physicians and converting site visitors into scheduled patients.

A Unique Opportunity

Now is the opportune time to implement physician ratings on your website. Innovators have paved the way, running the experiments, finding the solutions, and demonstrating the returns. But it’s still new enough that an investment here canconvey a first-mover advantage in many markets — an advantage that once earned, is difficult to counter.

Though you may have the opportunity to be the first in your market, implementing physician reviews and ratings now means you aren’t inventing from scratch. You can easily reference the solutions developed by the innovators or, if you are reluctant to take on the work yourself, partner with a vendor that can help you place physician ratings on your website. Some solutions even go beyond just placing ratings by providing the workflows necessary to survey patients, evaluate results, and publish reviews to your website according to your specific editorial criteria.

Learn More

Contact us if you’d like to learn how Geonetric can help implement physician ratings on your website. Or, check out our physician promotion webinar to learn more about this and other ways to enhance your patient acquisition with effective physician promotion. You can also download our comprehensive Online Physician Promotion eBook.