And Thomas, thanks for your thoughts on the subject. I’ll have to say I don’t disagree either of you.

All of your points are well made and not in conflict with any ideas presented in our presentation or with our advise to our clients. Content — text, images, audio, or video — must be relevant and informative. If properly integrated with related content and presented at a critical decision point, regardless of the platform, the prospective patient will be motivated to act on meaningful options and an online dialogue can begin. A newly diagnosed patient seeking a treatment may find an otherwise “boring hospital video” (or text for that matter) about a particular procedure extremely “interesting”. It’s all in presenting the right content at the right time to the right person.

….That’s exactly right, Aaron. I can stick as many videos up on the Web as I want, but hospital videos aren’t likely to be all that interesting. However, subjects I do think would work on YouTube would be patient profiles about rarer diseases and procedures.

But, as Aaron said, we can talk about YouTube all you want, but without content to motivate the visitor to give you a call, your video was unsuccessful. It’s not about getting hits or views or even linkbacks/trackbacks from YouTube; it’s about motivating the viewer to do two things: first, think the video was good enough to warrant further research at your institution, and, second, once he or she gets to your page, to think THAT content is good enough to warrant contact with your organization.

I’ve talked about this a few times in a few previous blog posts. You have to tailor your content to motivate visitors to come to you. And some content (even when complemented by videos) just won’t be successful unless the procedure/treatment is competitive. This takes into consideration the availability of treatment, specificity or focus on rare procedures, and/or some other aspect that will drive visitors to want to come to your facility.

At this time, unless it’s an outstanding patient profile, I don’t see much use in YouTube. I know our media relations team is looking to put more videos online, but if they’re just talking heads of doctors talking about some procedure, I severely doubt we’ll get many referrals from the ordeal. It must be interesting and motivating.

You claim that video is content, and while this is obviously true, I think what Thomas meant was that we’re missing the obvious fact that we’re not yet doing a good enough job marketing and integrating the content we already have (or more specifically, the content we are lacking). Specifically using meta tags and tieing in syndicated content with hospital-specific service line content.

Obviously a video produced by a hospital that is meant to either inform or market is not going to be nearly as viral as something that’s comedic or satirical in nature.

Just my $.02.

But… two quick points. You compare content and pizazz in discussing the value of video on the Web site. Video IS content, and, as most studies have show, is vastly more effective in communicating a message and converting a site visitor to a prospect than text.

On your reference to the YouTube video in the presentation having only 44 views… I think you are missing the point. The goal is not to have the next “Evolution of Dance” with 63 million views or the “UAB ER Rap” with 61,000 views. The goal is to expose the clinical service video content to a wide audience through another channel and to participate in a larger social environment. If done properly, through tagging, the videos can be seen by interested views in a relevant context.

Your thoughts?

Greystone definitely recommends having this, and pricing info, on your public site. I also am dubious as to how much demand there is for the quality info, but if you have the content why not post it online (barring issues about skewed results, etc.). I think the future of the quality info is going to be the sites that allow patients to compare quality indicators across multiple facilities. Consumer Reports for healthcare.

My guess? Patients/visitors either don’t know, or don’t care enough about quality reports. Hospitals tout quality reports and indicators, but really what does the general public know about what’s good and what’s bad, or what they really mean?