High Score Labs News   •   Nov 27, 2019

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Now days, we can hardly imagine our lives without the Internet. We read breaking news, look at friends’ photos, read latest reviews on new movies or gadgets. Many people, when they start to feel sick, may also use the internet to look up information on potential care providers or other related medical information. Just how much?

Some numbers:

According to the Deloitte report, 75% of the UK population does the Internet searching for information about health. The number of health apps on iOS and Android has more than doubled in 2.5 years.

It is important for health care providers to ensure that their online content and access to professional care is relevant and up to date. In the very competitive space of health care, it is not enough to be a simple site with phone numbers and addresses. If you want to become a leader, you have to utilize modern tools and technologies.

Here is our top 5 points to consider in digital transformation in healthcare.

1. Patients are increasingly online

Patients no longer simply follow the advice of one practitioner. Instead, the patient reads reviews and recommendations from other specialists using Google and sometimes will take consultation via the Internet. The potential patient then compares the information from the different sources and makes their choice regarding who they will see. In this case, the goal is to present relevant content and helpful experience in order to showcase your expertise.

2. Digital marketing is critical

Today, there are many different channels to deliver information to consumers: instant messaging, social networks, email, chatbots, voice search, email, etc. The global trend is to use messaging apps (chat bot, FB messenger, etc) to communicate with the company vs calling. This means that it is necessary to up your game and integrate online chat/messaging to create the largest impact on your audience. Another method is to create video content, since a potential patient will be more likely to click play on a video then to spend several minutes reading an article.

3. Personalization

Personalization is a key component to an effective online strategy. It helps you deliver relevant experiences to your target audience, no matter who that might be. There are several online tools that make this both effective and simple to implement. Personalization is critical, since it will also help you identify what people are most interested in and help you better plan your content strategy. Personalization could include custom online portals that contain relevant information based on the person that is signed in, presenting a list of nearby facilities or specialists based on their location and presenting helpful content based on their activity on the digital platform. One word of caution though is to ensure that how this information is used is compliant with your policies on handling PII and PMI and according to federal or state/local regulations.

4. SEO should be high priority

In 2018 Google implemented a program that focuses on expertise, authority, trustworthiness. Due to this, many websites (especially health care related) started to fall in their online SEO rankings on Google. This is something that can ruin your carefully crafted online marketing strategy since most potential (and existing) patients will use Google to find what they want or need, regardless of who their current provider may be, since they are interested in only the best option available. Ensuring that your content ranks high on search engines is then extremely important. It is common for such institutions to have a team of SEO experts that build out an effective SEO strategy and maintain high visibility in search engines such as Google.

5. Reviews make sense

Reviews become more and more important. If a prospective patient finds no review on the doctor or clinic, he or she may choose the other one with a full list of reviews. This fact encourages you to stimulate your customers for writing reviews on your product or service. This also helps your team ensure consistent and professional service across the board, provides feedback that you can use to improve your services to the patient.

What platform(s) should be used to achieve all of this?

There are many different options when it comes to platforms. In our years of expertise in this space, Sitecore and Episerver are great options and have a variety of marketing tools for personalization, customer engagement, SEO, etc. Both of them are excellent CMS with examples of many healthcare providers that use them. Which should you choose? Take our FREE assessment to find out!