Part Two: Digital Communications
Today we continue our conversation about healthcare communications. Let’s consider an expert’s assessment of how most healthcare organizations are doing on their digital communications, starting with these two quotes…
“In most of my experience, health departments do absolutely every freaking thing wrong in communication.”
“These large health systems think they’re doing communication because they have a corporate communication team, but they’re not doing social media right, and their websites aren’t necessarily right, either. Frankly, that’s typically because they have a 70 or 80 year old CEO who doesn’t love this stuff. So, 95% of what they’re doing in their so-called communication is driving the brand as opposed to driving the behavior that produces the quality health outcomes that then drive the brand, but, more importantly, actually take care of human beings.”
Those are quotes from Dr. Todd Wolynn, (on the left in the photo below) a pediatrician who was CEO/co-founder of Kids + Pediactrics in Pittsburg and who recently left that organization to devote himself to the Trusted Messenger program. (That’s part of a nonprofit called Public Good Projects funded by foundations, drug companies and others.)
Dr. Wolynn credits the use of “communications to drive quality” for the success of Kids+ in achieving exceptional vaccination rates, including HPV rates that were double the national average and far higher than those of the massive organizations that they competed against. Part of the communications strategy is around in-person conversations, which we discussed in a prior article (link), but today we’ll focus on digital communication, especially creating a website that has a big ROI on both dollars and time. Helping lead that effort was Chad Hermann, the group’s Communication Director, on the right in the photo below.
THE MISTAKE
To summarize Dr. Wolynn, the problem with most organization’s websites is that they tend to be the online equivalent of a brochure, along with “newsletters,” which tend to be bragging about the newest equipment, program, award, or something flattering about an executive. As Dr. Wolynn asks, “Who the hell’s the audience for that message? That’s all about branding for some mega profit or nonprofit.”
THE OPPORTUNITY
Instead of using a website for branding, Dr. Wolynn argues that it can be an extension of the conversation between the office and the patient/customer. Moreover, it not only serves as educational tool, it can pull new patients/customers to the organization. Here’s his ROI case for better online communications:
“One year we tracked every single new family who came into our practice — how they found out about us and what made them choose us. In pediatrics, where you’re constantly aging out your population, the lifeblood of a successful financial pediatric office is bringing in new families. So we tracked them and almost 60% of them said that they chose us because of our website and our social media. We were not a tech company, but that was driving 60% of our new our new families.”
THE AUDIENCE & THE MESSAGE(S)
As for how they built their digital presence, here are highlights from our conversation with Dr. Wolynn and Chad Hermann…
So, what’s the secret to effective digital communication?
Dr. Wolynn: “A major health care fallacy is that the only important communication occurs face-to-face, like it’s 1950 and you’re seeing Marcus Welby, and you’re going to store up all your questions for six months. Hey, it’s not just Gen Z, it’s not just Millennials — Xers and Boomers, too — they all expect to get their information when they want it, where they want, and how they want it. That could be two in the morning while breastfeeding on the couch, and frankly it’s probably 7:00 PM on the toilet.”
So, people want to be able to find information. For many websites that tends to be a list of links to other specialty sites or reprints of relevant articles – a library of online resources. Is that what you’re suggesting?
Chad Hermann: “Like ‘all politics is local,’ all pediatrics is local. That’s where the relationship exists. That’s where the trust exists. Yes, we can send people off from our sites to sources like the CDC, but the people they most trust are us. So, we started creating our own content. Over the course of five years we had our providers write over 350 ‘doctors notes,’ and we started filming videos. The idea was, ‘you trust us in-house, you’re going to trust us online, too.’ We’ll use outside resources and we’ll bring in outside guests but people are much more likely to read our material if they know it’s coming from the people they see in the office every day.
“During the pandemic, the simultaneously most horrifying and gratifying compliment we were ever paid and it was that people would say to us, ‘We don’t trust the CDC, we don’t trust the World Health Organization, we don’t trust the county health department: we trust you.’”
RETURN ON INVESTMENT OF TIME
You mentioned earlier that the digital communications had a strong ROI in terms of bringing in new patients – 60% of them saying that’s why they came to your group. But, for someone wanting to increase their online presence, it’s a daunting amount of time and energy. Tell us about the return on time invested.
Dr. Wolynn: “You start with the most common questions your patients ask. For us, one of them was, ‘What’s my dosage for my 6 month-old for ibuprofen or for acetaminophen?’ So we created a simple dosing guide online, very easily available on our website and posted to social media. Then we did it for allergy meds. That thing was downloaded literally tens of thousands of times. You can can bet a significant portion of those tens of thousands would have been phone calls to the office.
“I will tell you is that most expensive thing that somebody can do is call your practice. That’s why almost every big company has created these voicemail chains that discourage you — they’re just horrible. Then, if you get a live person, that person takes your message and somebody else has to respond to it. The best thing that we did with was create a range of different information that was palatable to the way that you wanted it, and our patients knew how to find it. If our triage nurses at 9:00 at night would get a call, they could say, ‘Okay, maybe come in tomorrow, but for now, I’m going to send you our doctor’s note on fever and one on diarrhea so you can read up on more information.’ That saves them a hell of a lot of time on the call and the parents are happy because now they’ve got this stuff they can read at any time of the day. Time and money, absolutely.
“Further, because people knew about us and found what we did was relevant, we outcompeted people in quality because we were able to get people to change behavior and want to come in and get immunized or want to come in and get their well visit or want to come in and get whatever was being measured.”
So we have time savings, cost savings and quality improvements: that’s ROI.
TRUSTED MESSENGER
The Trusted Messenger program is so new that it’s website is still under construction. We’ll bring you an update as it’s available.
Link to Part One
STATS OF THE MONTH
When Data Fails To Quench Your Thirst for Information
By Bill Davenhall, Geomedicine Analyst
What happens when you don’t think you have all the data you need? Do you just stop being curious or do you look for a work-around?
I want to tell you about three people who probably did more for than anyone for creating our continuous thirst for geographically specific data in health services. You probably never heard of Moon, Cain, and Hahn, all U.S. Postal Service employees. They created, back in 1963, the Zip Code as we know it today – something that everyone living in the US with a street address or a physical space that could receive mail. Initially called the “Zone Improvement Plan” an extensive IBM analysis in 2013 concluded that it added about $10 billion annually to the US economy (recent estimates are as high as $20 billion dollars). Not too bad for an “interesting idea” back in 1960’s to help improve the movement and sorting of mail to now over 150 million households across the United States.
There have been significant updates to the entire Zip Code process, including geocoding (automatically adding latitudes and longitudes to any street address), which have greatly expanded the usefulness of a street address on any type of transaction record. Many public health entities have already initiated that process but remain stymied in the use of that data in their daily analytical operations, for example in reporting, tracking, planning, and actually serving “customers”. An estimated 250 million retail transactions (14 million of which are medical claim forms) are created every day across the US where there is a validated US Postal Service street address. All these health transactional records could enjoy much greater geographic granularity that could drastically improve operational knowledge.
So, it’s pretty obvious that healthcare (health systems, public health departments, retail pharmacies, and medical practitioners) have contributed mightily to an ocean of data that certainly could be more useful and strategic for decision-makers and the people they serve. Am I right about that? With the amount of geographic precision available today, why don’t we all enjoy smarter and more timely information upon which to act and plan? How might you speed up the availability of critical “game changing” information on fast moving outbreaks or threats? How could you help local health systems have a better understanding what the health needs (demands) of a community (or for any geographic area) for use tomorrow or in five years? Is the 24/7 model of weather data analysis and information sharing unrealistic for health ecosystem innovation? The table below summarizes the analytical delay horizons for much of the data that healthcare needs to operate more efficiently as well to serve patients and health seeking consumers. The authors of this DHHS supported research describe a sobering assessment, in my opinion, that is calling for serious innovation to benefit the research community as well health-seeking consumers.
Smartly leveraging the data you have available to you today is the task at hand. Data collected daily that is not being used to build more timely or useful information should be seriously challenged by the “information innovators” within the immunization ecosystem.
Get them identified and involved!
2nd opinions always welcomed.
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