Throughout my career I’ve found it hard to market the work my team does internally. That’s certainly the case at my current place of employment. I beat the drum when I can, but too much of it feels overly self-serving.

We’ve been blessed over the last few years to win an inordinate number of awards, including some for best overall site in health care. Our results are consistently terrific, and I get asked for input from other health care systems — and to speak at relevant conferences — all the time.

But the popular sentiment internally is that the web site sucks (please excuse the language, but that’s what I hear).

Being in the communications business, I know that more of our work is publicly accessible and available than most others. For example, hundreds of thousands of people see the web site each month. Only a fraction of that total sees any particular doctor in a given month. Or even sees our biggest hospital in a given month. So we’re out there, and thus subject to everybody’s opinion.

I talk about our results, and our various awards, in every venue I can find, including our employee newsletters, management meetings, etc. I even put out a monthly report on our results that goes to a lot of heavy hitters, and I know it’s read because I hear about it if it’s late. I also have people quote back the numbers to me at meetings, etc.

So what am I to do? Just grow tougher skin? I’m looking for a little internal love, and it’s hard to come by!

Google recently offered a new service – Google Custom Search Engines (CSE) that lets you build a search engine focused on a pre-defined group of websites. The idea is simple, but very powerful.

As a test, I built four search engines this weekend and put them here: www.hospital-search.org

The four CSE’s limit searches to the following groups :

58 Maryland Hospitals
15 Washington D.C. hospitals
142 U.S. Medical Schools
170 U.S. News & World Report Hospitals

By limiting the websites to a known group, the quality of the results skyrockets. For example, my CEO is interested in creating a CEO Message on our site. Doing a search for CEO message in these search engines brought back pages of relevant results. Each one was from a hospital or medical school, and was useful for my research.

Here are a few samples:

Podcasts (in Top Hospitals)

Ask A Doctor (in Top Hospitals)

Pediatrics Residency (in US Medical Schools)

This is just a start, please check these out and let me know what you think. I’m sure you can come up with dozens of CSE’s that could be useful in our industry. All you need is an idea and good list of web sites.

Ed Bennett
Director, Web Strategy
University of Maryland Medical System

I just got back from a trip to the West Coast. Ugh, six hours in a plane and all you get are peanuts, maybe crackers. The last time I was on a flight that long it crossed the Atlantic. So I was starting to realize that the US is a really big country (I hadn’t thought about that in awhile).

So there I am in Davis, California driving back to Sacramento. I see a billboard for Sutter Health and it hits me. Hey, I know Judy at Sutter– she’s on Webiscope. And so is Vicki from UC Davis Health System. Traveling back home, the plane stops in Chicago. I can name a bunch of people on Webiscope/the listserv from Chicago hospitals. You get my drift. (And we didn’t even fly into Canada where at least 4 Webiscope members reside)

My next trip? I’m going all over the web to recruit new members. Webiscope is only as strong as our member base and their shared knowledge on managing healthcare websites. We may be geographically dispersed but Webiscope helps bridge the gap. After all, we’ve got the same issues, challenges, vendors, etc. And, we’ve got the experience to share with others.

Ok, Webiscope is not the only networking tool and I certainly did not invent the concept of online collaboration. So where else do you connect with others online? Was there a time when it hit you that it is indeed a small world after all?

I’m constantly being asked by various elements of our health care system about trying “new and innovative” approaches. For you and I, most of these aren’t really new. But for the people requesting them, they consider it a bold and dangerous forray into the unknown.

What usually sidetracks the conversation, however, is when I turn the discussion to what they want to accomplish. What are their goals and success measures? They usually have no idea.

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