In today’s corporate world there seems to be an emphasis on creating and maintaining a strong brand identity. Of course, as we all know, this isn’t a priority for everyone. We often get requests from doctors and nurses for shirts or other items with completely off-the-wall logos or additions to our logos. But sometimes it isn’t the big thing that makes a brand identity; it’s many small things that complete an already-existing brand identity. And for that reason, I’d like to introduce you to the favicon. Read the rest of this entry »

I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was in college. I ran across it in an old used bookstore and thought the title sounded cool. I remember standing there debating whether to buy the book, daydreaming at the very least some cute co-ed might see me reading it under a tree on campus and think I was hip. Three dollars and change later I was immersed in Robert Pirsig’s cross-country motorcycle quest into western values. Little did I know the book’s central question “What is Quality?” would then haunt me and eventually find its way into my work.

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This morning I received an internal email, with the attached article. Since this is our industry - regardless of our “home team” (communications, marketing, IT, etc) - I thought it appropriate to share here, as well.

Regardless of the politics behind this campaign, I’m thrilled to find this resource and hope that as time goes forward we will only see greater enrollment from the rest of the industry. This is the sort of broadband, shotgun-approach metric set that I hope will foster an industry-wide competitive mindset; not necessarily to beat the nearest competition - but because the end result will hopefully be a continual rise in all the average scores, as the industry itself strengthens.

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Here at Baptist Health Care, Pensacola, Fl, we recently rolled out a fresh redesign of our intranet. For approximately a decade we have had some variation of an intranet available to our organization’s staff. With each redesign, our intranet has slowly evolved into the powerful and useful tool it is today. Through this process we have narrowed down what makes a successful intranet to these three areas.

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Our core values here at Scripps Health talk about ‘putting the patient first’ and the fact that ‘quality is our passion’. Our current website, scripps.org, doesn’t do a very good job of projecting those core values to the world.

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Large Web sites are constantly trying to provide content to many types of users- all with various needs. So how do we organize many types information and actions horizontally across our site(s) while still providing a consistent approach?

At Johns Hopkins Medicine we have begun exploring how we can display both design aspects and internal client goals harmoniously within the Web site(s).

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I received this letter from Neal Linkon from Aurora Health Care this morning:

I’m not coming to next year’s dinner. And it breaks my heart. But it’s still the right thing to do. You see, I’m taking the plunge into the vendor side of things, so that makes me ineligible to join you.

After nearly six years of managing Aurora’s interactive marketing, including the award-winning AuroraHealthCare.org, I’m moving on to join Greystone.Net as Senior Vice President. It gives me the chance to do what I like best for health care systems and providers all over the country.

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As many of you forum-regulars may already know, I’m in the process of obtaining my MBA. The countless hours I’ve now been spending at the Bradley Library, have been met with this blinking light bulb effect and no it’s not from the fluorescent lights. In my next few blog posts, I’m going to share a few of those light bulb moments with you.

Have you ever done any benchmarking for your web site? You may have and just don’t realize it. Google just came out a few months ago with this cool new feature where you can benchmark particular stats against other hospitals. I’ll leave that topic to Bart to expand on for you in a future post or perhaps it could be a topic of discussion in the forums. You should check it out if you haven’t already.

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If you don’t mind, let’s take a moment to pat ourselves on our backs. WebiScope has come a long way in providing healthcare Web professionals a medium to discuss, collaborate, and come together for camaraderie. I know in my time at WebiScope I’ve had the good fortune of experiencing all three of those qualities.

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Which comes first, the audience or the features? Just because you implement some new feature, will that draw the audience - or does your audience define the features in your implementation?

Ideally, they’d coincide: a cool new technology becomes mainstream and widely used by the public just as your new-tech-feature-rich content goes live … and your site traffic goes into orbit. How cool would that be?

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