I spoke on a panel at the recent World Health Care Congress 2nd Annual Leadership Summit on Consumer Connectivity. My panel was ostensibly about patient education but my focus was to be Twitter. To get a sense of the audience’s comfort level I asked, “How many people are familiar with Twitter,” expecting to have to explain the concept to a room half full of confused people.
It might be considered old news now, but Google and Cleveland Clinic have teamed up to provide patients’ health information through a secured Google account. After running a wildly successful patient portal with over 100,000 participants, this seems to bypass the hospital-specific portal and extend it to a patient’s private account. Is this the future of patient health information? Read the rest of this entry »
In the everlasting debate about a centralized vs. decentralized hierarchy of Web management, there comes the realistic perspective that our oft-small departments can be easily overwhelmed by thousands of pages of information, not to mention a seemingly infinite power struggle to produce more interactivity and more “shiney gadgets” for our sites. Such advancements take time and resources, both personnel- and money-wise, and eventually we end up with a network of associates and colleagues we trust. But finding those “angels in the outfield” can be difficult. Read the rest of this entry »
There are myriad web tools out there that one can use in health care marketing and communications. From social utilities to news feeds and search ads, as web professionals we now cultivate a web presence for our organizations, rather than just a web site.
Tending to our brand’s online travels keeps reminding me, though, that it’s still about Scripps.org: we need effective content for users to come to after they’ve encountered a component of our web presence. Are you optimizing site content as part of your overall online strategy?
You’ve seen that sign, right? “Plan Ahea … ” – no “d”, because they ran out of space. Yeah, haha, funny. Until it really happens. Let me tell you about what happened this past August in Syracuse, New York.
There isn’t much in my wife’s Personal Health Record that hasn’t been shared on the Internet. When she became pregnant two years ago she decided to use the web to learn as much as possible about the wonderful and terrifying uncertainties of pregancy. She participated in the WebMD message boards with other women, candidly sharing her difficulties and observations in a very public forum. The women that made up her community on the boards were from all over the country. They had different ethnic, economic and social backgrounds. Their perspective differences ran the gamut. But pregnancy was their common ground.
In the age of Web 2.0 and 3.0, our content management systems are offering more features than ever. We can give our users the options to embed our content, feed it to a reader, have it e-mailed to a friend, or texted to their phones. For the Web czar, we can integrate content with a click of a button, have alerts e-mailed to us, and give our users limited access to make changes to their own content. But while many features are obviously useful, some other features are still archaic, vestigial, or simply useless. Read the rest of this entry »
Perhaps it’s time to consider becoming a regular blog author on WebsiScope.com, or even an occasional guest author.
The public blog on WebiScope.com reaches further than just an audience of your peers. That ‘audience of peers’ may be broader than you expect, considering the diversity of job titles, organization types and sizes, even the ‘home department’ of the audience members themselves. And in return for publishing your thoughts, insights and questions, you’ll receive feedback from the growing number of readers.
I’d like to set up a schedule of regular authors and/or topics, with special guests sprinkled throughout. If you’d like to participate, please join the blog and drop me an email. Let me know what topic(s) you’d like to discuss, and whether you’re interested in a regular spot or just an occasional post. Thanks; we look forward to hearing from you – and reading what you have to say!
And don’t worry; we have spell check.
I stopped by the SHSMD Annual Conference the other week and a quick glimpse at the agenda told me that people were vibrating with excitement about the potential of Social Media and Web 2.0. Every other session seemed to promise answers to the big question: “What’s in it for me?”
Always interested in broadening my perspective, I stopped by a couple of the sessions. Instead of meaty answers based on unique results, the sessions I attended offered bland and broad commentary focusing mainly on how the presenter’s presence on Site X had driven traffic to their parent site. “There has to be more than that,” I thought to myself as I shuffled out onto the San Francisco streets with the rest of the confused mass.
The news has barely had time to settle in, but Google has officially released its Web browser, Chrome. With Firefox holding approximately 15% of the marketshare and IE holding much of the rest, Chrome’s influence is yet to be seen, but if Google is serious about taking away traditional IE users and pushes it to its search engine users, we could perhaps see a marketshare of 5-10%, if not more, within a year. And that could spell trouble for our Web sites, which often have to be partially recoded for browser-specific capabilities and quirks. Read the rest of this entry »
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