Facebook marketing for physical therapy, occupational therapy, rehab therapy, and healthcare clinical practices. Learn more at http://www.updocmedia.com

For years, the healthcare industry has been scrambling to use new technologies to access consumers, to get closer to us, to secure us as customers. 

Healthcare organizations got on social media, built patient portals and smartphone apps. And guess what? It didn’t really work all that well. The intentions were good, but it turns out it was really all about them and not about us, the healthcare consumers. The focus was in the wrong place.

Today’s technology allows organizations to push out more and more information, useful or not. Conversely, technology enables the consumers of that information to throttle it. Consumers have more control over what they see and when they see it than ever before. Technology for technology’s sake has ceased to be the end game. Healthcare consumers are savvy and, more and more, want control—of everything.  

As Syndrome tells the Parr family in The Incredibles about his plan to sell his inventions and technology to all-comers: “Everyone can be super, and when everyone’s super, no one will be.” And that, essentially, is what’s happening with technology in healthcare. Everyone in the healthcare business has access to more or less the same technology: websites, patient portals, connected devices, wearables, chatbots, artificial intelligence. It’s understanding, fashioning, and empowering the relationships between these technologies and our humanity that will make healthcare organizations super today and in the future.

Online reviews build trust

To some degree, technology has become commoditized because everyone from health systems to healthcare providers to patients has access to it at a very low price. 

There’s an opportunity, however, for healthcare organizations to be super by using technology to serve customers. But they must approach the issue from the healthcare consumer’s point of view. The way to gain trust is by creating long-term, mutually beneficial relationships between healthcare consumers and healthcare organizations. 

The University of Utah hospital gets this relationship-based model. They understand healthcare consumers want to control their treatment destiny. 

Healthcare consumers using the university’s website bypass the marketing hype and go straight to the doctor ratings. That’s right. More than 40,000 patients have ranked and evaluated hundreds of primary care physicians and specialists. By opening its staff to this criticism, the hospital is fostering a long-term bond with anyone who is or may become a patient.

The hospital’s openness builds trust and puts the organization’s emphasis—from the very top to the very bottom—onimproving patient care and interactions.

Temper technology with humanity

The USC Center for Body Computing gets it, too. They recently published fitness research using leading-edge technology, including glasses with a biometric sensor. But the technology was simply the pipeline used to support a relationship built between study participants, digital coaches and an online community of like-minded people. This far-reaching social network, literally and figuratively, was designed to encourage participation in an exercise program.

The researchers learned three things increased engagement:

• Digital coaching; 
• Social networks; and
• Philanthropy (participants who reached a certain involvement goal activated a donation of an eye exam and glasses to a person in need).

"One in every five Americans wears a health tracker but there was no research that took a look at what motivates engagement, until now," according to Leslie Saxon, MD, founder and executive director of the USC Center for Body Computing and the study’s primary investigator.

The engagement described in the study has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with friendships, relationships, andaltruism. This is technology done right. It works for the patient allowing her to engage with others on multiple levels and in doing so creates and builds long-term relationships. 

So the fact that 90 percent of healthcare practices offer a patient portal sounds great, like the healthcare industry’s work is already done. Unfortunately, that’s not true. Through its own studies the MGMA found many patient portals are poorly designed and really nothing more than a secure spot to send and receive messages.          

Poorly designed and clunky. Not a great strategy to build long-term patient relationships nor to keep healthcare consumers coming back to use the portal. Most patients who used these portals were undoubtedly one-time users who found them utterly useless for accomplishing anything that might be related to improving health.

Technology, of course, hasn’t really run its course. And it’s not going away.

But it is critical to temper and separate technology hype and usage with humanity in order to achieve the balance necessary to bring healthcare consumers into the fold even as new functionalities are implemented. The healthcare industry can’t lose sight of its customers as new technologies are brought into hospitals and exam rooms. 

Antonella Bonanni is chief marketing officer of healthcare at Cognizant, a Fortune 200 company. Antonella has an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh and a Masters of Communications from the CUOA in Vicenza, Italy.

In this interview, EP Lab Digest talks with Farris K. Timimi, MD, Medical Director of the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network (MCSMN), and Lee Aase, Director of the MCSMN and Communications Director of Mayo Clinic’s Social and Digital Innovation (SDI) Team, about social media strategies in health care. 

Tell us about your medical background. How did you become involved with the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network (MCSMN)?

I am a cardiologist specializing in heart failure, and through that work have had an interest in patient involvement, such as with creation of our Patient and Family Advisory Committees. On major initiatives and in our basic structure, Mayo Clinic uses an physician/administrator model of shared leadership, with the administrator managing day-to-day operations and the physician leader helping to ensure medical relevance.

When the Mayo Clinic created what is now MCSMN, I was very interested in taking on the role of Medical Director.

What is the purpose of the MCSMN? When and why was it formed?

In 2011, Mayo Clinic created our Center for Social Media, which is now the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network, to help bring the social media revolution to health care. Our first goal was to ensure that Mayo Clinic staff and stakeholders had the guidelines, training, and resources to apply social media tools in support of clinical practice, education, and research. We also saw an opportunity to share globally what we were developing with colleagues, as well as learn alongside them as we navigated issues and concerns with these new technologies.

We see MCSMN as a catalyst to reduce the activation energy required to apply social media in health care organizations. By using our resources, colleagues can advance in their knowledge and capabilities more quickly than they would on their own.

Our association with Mayo Clinic also helps members gain internal buy-in; with these resources, they will be building on an approach and philosophy that has been shown to be safe and effective.

What is the role of social media in healthcare today? Additionally, what is the role of social media in healthcare education, research, and practice?

Social media has had a transformative impact on society as a whole, and health care is no exception. Through platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and others, patients and caregivers can share their experiences as well as look for support and answers. They are able to overcome barriers of space and time to connect with others like them, even if they have a rare condition that is not shared by anyone in their immediate geographical area.

The patients were there first, but now medical professionals and organizations are seeing opportunities to listen, serve, and educate using these tools. 

Tell us about the Social for Healthcare Certificate from the Mayo Clinic and Hootsuite. How did this collaboration come about? What does this training program help achieve? 

The Social for Healthcare Certificate from Mayo Clinic and Hootsuite (https://mayocl.in/2btyyIt) provides focused and trustworthy training for busy professionals who want to safely and effectively learn to use social media. We developed this course with Hootsuite because we wanted to keep it up to date, reflecting on the latest changes in social platforms. Hootsuite markets to its clients, while we offer it to MCSMN members.

Because of its modular design and online delivery, participants can choose the elements they find most valuable and that fit their busy schedule, and it’s available on-demand, 24/7.

This course is our front-line training for any Mayo staff interested in using social media for professional purposes.

Physicians obviously could figure out elements of using social media on their own through trial and error, but our goal is to condense what they need to know into brief modules that they can apply to create their own professional presence, and to avoid missteps they otherwise might make.

What is the Social Media Residency? How long is the program, and what topics are covered?

Social Media Residency (https://mayocl.in/2dt4ABT) is a one-day program for those interested in developing a social media strategy aligned with their professional or organizational priorities. Some participants are social media managers for hospitals and are developing overall organizational strategies, while others are clinicians or scientists interested in narrower applications. Our online training provides the foundation, and then in Social Media Residency, we go beyond those basics and dig into strategy, providing guidelines for plan development.

In addition, what can you tell us about the Social Media Fellows Program?

The Social Media Fellows program (https://mayocl.in/2RTmPpg) is for those who have gone through Social Media Residency, and want guidance in developing and implementing their social media strategic plans. It’s also a way for them to give back by sharing their experiences with the Network.

How many people have completed the Social for Healthcare Certificate, Social Media Residency, and Social Media Fellows Program thus far? Who is best suited to participate in these programs? 

We’ve had more than 2,000 participants in the Social for Healthcare Certificate, and more than 700 in Social Media Residency. The Fellows program is much smaller, as it involves developing a strategic plan and submitting for review.

The Social for Healthcare Certificate is appropriate for anyone in health care, whether in a clinical or research role or in administration, marketing, and communications. It helps those who aren’t familiar with social media to get up-to-speed quickly, and for younger staff who have personal experience in social media, it introduces important elements of professionalism that are necessary in the health care context.

Social Media Residency is mainly for those who are advocates for social media and who are interested in promoting strategic use of these platforms.

Which programs are available online or onsite? What costs are involved with these opportunities?

As mentioned earlier, the Social for Healthcare Certificate is our online, on-demand program. While the retail price for the course is $250, we include it in both Premium Individual and Organizational memberships.

Registration for Social Media Residency is $795, and includes the Social for Healthcare Certificate. Organization members save 25 percent, and also may have the opportunity to host Social Media Residency, which can enable broader participation by their staff.

What the benefits of MCSMN membership? What other opportunities are available? 

In addition to the Social for Healthcare Certificate, premium members of MCSMN have access to a members-only discussion board where they can safely and confidentially get feedback and answers from fellow members. They also have access to our monthly webinars (regularly $95 each) and save 25 percent on any of our in-person events, including our Annual Conference and Social Media Residency.

In addition to Premium Individual membership, we also offer Organization membership at an affordable flat rate, which gives full premium membership to anyone on the organization’s email domain (e.g., mayo.edu).

Tell us more about the upcoming annual conference in November.

Our Annual Conference will take place from November 14-15 in Jacksonville, Florida, with four compelling keynotes and three tracks of case studies and opportunities for networking and expert consultations. We’re also offering Social Media Residency on our Mayo Clinic campus in Jacksonville on November 13, with special bundled registration available.

Who is involved with Mayo Clinic’s Social and Digital Innovation (SDI) Team?

Our Social and Digital Innovation Team is led by my administrative partner, Lee Aase, and includes representatives on our campuses in Florida and Arizona as well as several members in Minnesota. The SDI team maintains Mayo Clinic’s overall social media presence and also consults with Mayo stakeholders interested in professional or specialty accounts. It also provides the foundation for what we offer through MCSMN. (Editor's Note: See interview with Lee Aase in sidebar.)

Why is important for healthcare professionals to engage on social media? Also, what brief tips do you have for healthcare professionals about how to build a digital identity?

Health care professionals at least need to understand the importance of their online reputation, and the role social media presence can play in shaping what people find when they Google your name. Doctors should all claim and complete their profiles on Doximity, and should also consider how presence on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social networks can affect search results.

Beyond that, they should explore how they can use these tools to accomplish their life’s work. These are powerful tools for communication that enable us to have a much bigger impact than we otherwise would. 

At the same time, digital tools used incorrectly can do more damage than analog communications. But just as with other tools, with proper guidelines and training, these can do immense good.

What main social media platforms are doctors currently using?

Twitter and LinkedIn are probably the most important participatory platforms for physicians. 

Using Twitter hashtags related to diseases or scientific meetings enables physicians to participate in niche conversations that interest them, highlight their expertise, and learn more about patients’ experiences.

LinkedIn provides a platform for longer-form writing and sharing in a more professionally-oriented environment.

Presence on both of these can strongly influence online search results for the physician’s name, pushing some of the unreliable rating and review sites down the page.

Why should organizations and individuals utilize the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network?

The recent PBS documentary by Ken Burns, The Mayo Clinic: Faith – Hope – Science (https://to.pbs.org/2P3yKCk), begins with an African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” 

Through the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network, we help our members go both farther and faster. By using our guidelines, templates, and training materials, our members can jumpstart their social media involvement with trusted resources. And by collaborating with like-minded colleagues from around the globe, they can get new ideas and perspectives to help shape their own initiatives.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

The Mayo Clinic Social Media Network is a modern-day manifestation of our founders’ philosophy and practice. Drs. Will and Charlie Mayo recognized that to provide the best care to every patient, they needed to travel and learn from others, and bring that knowledge back to their rural Minnesota practice. Dr. Will visited 25 countries on five continents at a time when travel was arduous.

They also welcomed physicians to visit and observe them in surgery, and in the period from 1908 to 1918 alone, nearly 3,400 physicians came to Rochester to observe them and become part of what became known as The Surgeons Club.

We see the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network as the health care social media version of what the Mayo brothers did in surgery, and we’re glad that we can connect with colleagues both face-to-face in our in-person events, and on a continuing basis through the MCSMN community.

I would invite anyone who is interested in these resources to contact my administrative partner, Lee Aase. We’d be glad to be of service.

For more information, follow along on Twitter: 

@FarrisTimimi

@MayoClinicSMN

 

Interview with Lee Aase, Director of the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network (MCSMN) and Communications Director of the Mayo Clinic’s Social and Digital Innovation (SDI) Team

Meeting recruitment goals is incredibly challenging for any clinical trial, but it’s even more so when fewer than 200,000 people nationwide are potential candidates, as is often the case for rare disease studies.

No matter what condition they’re investigating, clinical trials are always concerned about sufficient patient enrollment. No wonder: upwards of 75% of clinical trials fail to meet recruiting targets. However, it’s even harder to reach recruiting goals for rare disease clinical trials. When pulling from an small pool of potential candidates, reaching an enrollment number that ensures reliable results can seem impossible.

It’s true that recruiting for rare disease clinical trials is in many ways a whole new ball game. There are unique challenges — even beyond patient population numbers — that accompany these kinds of trials. With that being said, the agility and affordability of digital marketing make digital solutions especially impactful, as long as sponsors and CROs are innovative in their marketing approach.

Reaching a Small Patient Pool

The FDA defines rare diseases as those affecting fewer than 1 in 200,000 people, which equates to 200,000 people or fewer in the United States. Reaching such a small pool of candidates is difficult to begin with, but that difficulty is compounded by the fact that many rare disease sufferers are misdiagnosed due to the rarity of their actual condition. In addition, many rare diseases have a high level of genotypic heterogeneity, which can make standardized results near-impossible to achieve.

For rare disease trials, success hinges on communicating with the right patients and making it as convenient as possible for them to participate in the trial. Fortunately, when it comes to reaching potential patients, many of the same tactics that work for regular clinical trials are even more effective for rare disease trials.

Facebook offers a unique opportunity to reach patients with rare diseases. With almost 2.3 billion active users, Facebook has 100% coverage of many disease populations, meaning that everyone in the world with a certain condition has a Facebook account. By targeting users that are interested in rare disease Facebook groups, sponsors and CROs can pinpoint likely trial participants out of a sea of social media users.

Patients with rare diseases tend to do a lot of research on their conditions, and there’s no better place to meet them than in their search results. With Google Ads, sponsors and CROs can target long tail keywordsassociated with the condition they’re studying, presenting ads to patients or caregivers who are looking for alternative treatments.

Putting the Patient First

While rare disease patients tend to be open to clinical trials, especially if treatments for their condition are currently nonexistent or lacking, it’s likely that the locations of most clinical trials make them inaccessible to many eligible patients. For a rare disease clinical trial to be successful, sponsors and CROs need to think in terms of the patient first.

Eligible patients are few and far between, so it’s worth going to them. Trials should wait and see where their patient populations are located before choosing research sites. In some cases, it may even be a good idea to travel directly to patients, especially if their condition limits mobility.

Rare diseases are attracting more clinical trial attention than ever before, but in many ways, they’re also the perfect storm of trial challenges. Between recruitment difficulties and obstacles to accessibility, it’s up to rare disease clinical trials to be more innovative, nimble, and patient-centric than any of their peers. It’s possible that these trials aren’t just creating groundbreaking treatments and cures for rare diseases; they’re also paving the way for greater efficiency and improved patient experience in all clinical trials.

At the Digital Pharma East conference in Philadelphia last month, Danielle Salowski told attendees:

“Now we feel that we’ve gotten to a point where we mastered Facebook, we want to talk about Instagram. This is now a place you need to pay attention to in order to reach patients at scale. [Instagram] is the intersection of amazing visual communication and the ability to share it with your friends and patients in a snap.”

Of course, Instagram presents numerous challenges for pharma marketers and there are a number of things they should take into consideration when developing Instagram campaigns.

Think visually and less formally

The highly visual nature of Instagram means that pharma marketers need to think creatively about how they can create image and video-based content that is more likely to resonate with Instagram’s younger user base.

As part of this, pharma marketers are wise to think about their tone. As Nancy Nolan, associate director of marketing communications at Merck, who appeared on stage with Facebook’s Salowski, explained, “When you think about pharma, we’re very formal in the way we speak and address patients, and it can be really standoffish. Millennials don’t like to be spoken to with that type of formality and tone.”

Monitor hashtags to identify virtual communities

Healthcare marketers should consider that they can tap into pseudo-communities that form around hashtags on Instagram. Facebook’s Salowski pointed to the hashtag, #migraine, pointing out that “there are a ton of posts just using #migraine, and [Instagram] is a place where patients come to connect, talk about their experience visually, and share with friends.”

By monitoring hashtags of interest, pharma marketers can identify opportunities to join the proverbial conversation, engaging patients and also, where appropriate, caretakers.

Consider teaming up with influencers

While influencer marketing on Instagram is most often the domain of fashion houses, beauty brands, and the like, with a little creativity, pharma marketers can also team up with popular Instagrammers to spread their messages.

Of course, choosing which messages to spread is critical. In many cases, pharma marketers are likely to find that unbranded campaigns aimed at driving awareness of conditions they offer treatments for are ideal for influencer campaigns. After all, by partnering with influencers who are in some way connected to those conditions, brands have an opportunity to foster emotional connections.

Don’t forget about healthcare professionals

While social marketing in many industries often focuses on consumers, pharma marketers shouldn’t overlook opportunities to reach healthcare professionals, including physicians, via social media.

As influencer marketing platform InNetwork noted, many healthcare professionals are active on social platforms today, where they have established themselves as trusted sources of healthcare information to both other healthcare professionals as well as consumers. As the company observed, “By partnering with a healthcare professional, you open the doors to both target audiences.”

Remember the rules

The rules that pharma marketers are required to adhere to don’t disappear simply because they might be slightly more inconvenient to comply with on social platforms.

A reminder of this fact came recently as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fired off a warning letter to pharma company Mannkind for failing to disclose the risks associated with Afrezza, its inhaled insulin drug, in content posted on its Facebook Page.

The letter was the result of a complaint made to the FDA Office of Prescription Drug Promotion (OPDP) Bad Ad program, which allows third parties to report potentially problematic ads.

In its letter, the OPDP demanded that Mannkind remove non-compliant content, which the firm appears to have done. A failure to do so could have led to enforcement action, something no pharma marketer wants to have to deal with.

In any given year, depression affects more than six percent of the adult population in the United States—some 16 million people—but fewer than half receive the treatment they need.

What if an algorithm could scan social media and point to linguistic red flags of the disease before a formal medical diagnosis had been made?

New research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,shows this is now more plausible than ever. Analyzing social media data shared by consenting users across the months leading up to a depression diagnosis, researchers from Stony Brook University and the University of Pennsylvania found their algorithm could accurately predict future depression. Indicators of the condition included mentions of hostility and loneliness, words like “tears” and “feelings,” and use of more first-person pronouns like “I” and “me.”

“What people write in social media and online captures an aspect of life that’s very hard in medicine and research to access otherwise. It’s a dimension that’s relatively untapped compared to biophysical markers of disease,” says H. Andrew Schwartz,Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University and principal investigator of the World Well-Being Project. “Conditions like depression, anxiety, and PTSD, for example, you find more signals in the way people express themselves digitally.”

For six years, researchers in the World Well-Being Project (WWBP), based in Stony Brook’s Human Language Analysis Lab and UPenn’s Positive Psychology Center, have been studying how the words people use reflect their inner feelings and contentedness. In 2014, Johannes Eichstaedt, WWBP founding research scientist and a postdoctoral fellow at Penn, started to wonder whether it was possible for social media to predict mental health outcomes, particularly for depression.

“Social media data contain markers akin to the genome. With surprisingly similar methods to those used in genomics, we can comb social media data to find these markers,” Eichstaedt explains. “Depression appears to be something quite detectable in this way; it really changes people’s use of social media in a way that something like skin disease or diabetes doesn’t.”

Eichstaedt and Schwartz teamed up with colleagues Robert J. Smith, Raina Merchant,David Asch, and Lyle Ungar from the Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health for this study. Rather than do what previous studies had done—recruit participants who self-report their depression—the researchers identified data from people consenting to share Facebook statuses and electronic medical record information, then analyzed it using machine-learning techniques to distinguish those with a formal depression diagnosis.

Nearly 1,200 people consented to provide both digital archives. Of these, 114 people had a diagnosis of depression in their medical records. The researchers then matched every person with a diagnosis of depression with five who did not, to act as a control, for a total sample of 683 people (excluding one for insufficient words within status updates). The idea was to create as realistic a scenario as possible to train and test the researchers’ algorithm. 

“This is a really hard problem,” Eichstaedt says. “If 683 people present to the hospital and 15 percent of them are depressed, would our algorithm be able to predict which ones? If the algorithm says no one was depressed, it would be 85 percent accurate.”

To build the algorithm, Eichstaedt, Smith, and colleagues looked back at 524,292 Facebook updates from the years leading up to diagnosis for each individual with depression and for the same time span for the control. They determined the most frequently used words and phrases, then modeled 200 topics to suss out what they called “depression-associated language markers.” Finally, they compared in what manner and how frequently depressed versus control participants used such phrasing.

They learned that these markers comprised emotional, cognitive, and interpersonal processes such as hostility and loneliness, sadness and rumination, and could predict future depression as early as three months before first documentation of the illness in a medical record.

“There’s a perception that using social media is not good for one’s mental health, but it may turn out to be an important tool for diagnosing, monitoring, and eventually treating it,” Schwartz says. “Here, we’ve shown that it can be used with clinical records, a step toward improving mental health with social media.”

Eichstaedt sees long-term potential in using these data as a form of unobtrusive screening. “The hope is that one day, these screening systems can be integrated into systems of care,” he says. “This tool raises yellow flags; eventually the hope is that you could directly funnel people it identifies into scalable treatment modalities.”

Despite some limitations to the study, including a distinctive urban sample, and limitations in the field itself—not every depression diagnosis in a medical record meets the gold standard that structured clinical interviews provide, for example—the findings offer a potential new way to uncover and get help for those suffering from depression.

Social Media Posts Can Predict Depression was originally published on the Stony Book University website.

THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF PATIENT ENGAGEMENT

According to industry experts, there are four principles of patient engagement:

• Willingness: Is the patient willing to be engaged in their own healthcare management?

• Proactiveness: Is the patient willing to be proactive about their health care? Many people, especially older patients, might prefer to leave health care management to the professionals.

• Adaptability: Is the patient willing and able to use computers or smartphones to interact with the practice during off hours?

• Support: Is there enough support available to help the patient stay on track and be proactive about their health care?

Whether a patient is willing and able to be proactive about their health will depend on the patient, and will need to be assessed on an individual level. Not all patients are willing to take that responsibility or have the technical aptitude to access the tools provided to them.

IMPROVING PATIENT ENGAGEMENT CLOSE TO HOME

What can offices and staff do to improve patient engagement closer to home? There are quite a few tools that can be utilized, though some might take a substantial investment of time and money.

• Utilize social media: Social media is a fantastic tool for patient engagementif used correctly. It needs to be carefully navigated to ensure no protected patient information is shared over social media, but it can engage patients, especially younger ones, in a way other tools might miss.

• Provide and utilize patient portals: Portals give patients a way to keep track of their medical records and treatment. These portals can also be used to allow patients to pay their bills online, which saves practices time and money. Upwards of 60 percent of adults prefer to pay bills online, and offering online bill-pay can reduce the need for follow-ups.

• Create and maintain a patient communication platform: Not every patient can afford to take the time to make a phone call or come into the office when they have a question, whether it’s about billing, medication or anything in between. Having an easily accessible and secure communications platform can help patients be more proactive about their health care by giving them the answers they need quickly and correctly.

These are just a few potential examples of ways to improve patient engagement in local offices. The exact implementation will vary from office to office to better cater to the needs of each patient.

Patient engagement is quickly becoming the future of medicine, largely by necessity, because patients are constantly connected via smartphones and the internet and want to be just as connected to their medical practitioners.

It’s up to professionals to choose the best way to engage with their patients.

1. Recognize the Need for Speed

Our first expert, Karen Zupko, President of the medical practice management consulting firm Karen Zupko & Associates, Inc., points to The Short Life of Online Sales Leads published in the Harvard Business Review. This article covers research that audited more than 2,000 U.S. companies to measure how long each took to respond to a web-generated lead (see chart). They found that 37% responded with an hour and 16% within 1 to 24 hours. But 24% took more than 24 hours and 23% never responded at all!

The article states, “These results are especially shocking given how quickly online leads go cold—a phenomenon we explored in a separate study, which involved 1.25 million sales leads received by 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies in the United States. Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead than those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.”

Eva Sheie, the Director of Professional Education at RealSelf, emphasizes the importance of responding quickly. A study done by her team at RealSelf found that the likelihood of successfully scheduling a consultation increases by 76% if you respond within 1 hour as opposed to the industry average response time of 2 days.

Here at Etna Interactive, we recommend that our clients strive to respond to all inquiries within 5 minutes during normal business hours.

2. Be Tenacious

The experts we consulted indicate that persistence is as important as speed.

Sandy Roos, a plastic surgery business consultant for Sientra, has data that showed an increase in the schedule rate when practices follow up with prospects 4 to 5 times within the first 7 days post-inquiry.

Catherine Maley, president of Cosmetic Image Marketing, recommends that you continue to stay in contact until they ask you not to. She reminds us that “people change, circumstances change, technologies change, so keep in touch forever since you never know how close they are to picking up that phone again to call you and book!”

Marie Olesen, Founder & Chief Patient Experience Officer of Vizium360, agrees with Maley. “Presume good intent. Understand that follow up is a process. It may take several attempts. If a prospect doesn’t respond immediately, keep trying. Don’t misinterpret no response as lack of interest. What seems like a whim may actually be the culmination of years of thought. Try again in a different mode, email, call, or text.”

Enrique Rangel, CEO of MyMedLeads, was able to review data from his clients’ 2.5 million leads and see that most of them are missing the mark on following up. Rangel found that “the most successful practice will attempt to call the lead 3.2 times, while 70% of those leads we analyzed were only called once.”

3. Create a Protocol

All of our experts stressed the importance of having a protocol in place. While it’s one thing to knowwhat to do, it’s another to actually do it.

Roos says “I suggest to all my practices to have a defined follow-up protocol in place regardless of if they have a phone number.  I have found many patients who inquire online are not quite ready to talk to someone (or they would have called themselves) so to answer via email as well.”

Think Quantity

So how many touchpoints are suggested? More than you think! Maley maps out a series of 15 to 27 points of contact via calls, emails, and texts. “The point is to turn it into protocol just like you do in surgery. This helps ensure it gets done no matter what your mood or how busy you get.”

Be a Standout

It’s important to have something interesting to say or provide when you’re contacting prospective patients. Olesen suggests using a series of diverse touchpoints that showcase your quality and differentiate your practice. That could be sharing ratings and reviews, patient stories, awards, etc. “Remember, it won’t take long before yours is the only practice following up.”

4. Personalize Your Outreach Efforts

Just because you have a protocol, doesn’t mean it has to be dry and impersonal. Tips include:

• Always use the patient’s name in email communication.
• Using an autoresponder? Make sure it works. Zupko recalls receiving an email addressed to: “Dear {Patient Name}”
• Maley recommends providing strategic FAQs in follow up responses so that prospective patients feel you understand them.
• Maley also recommends that you “End with a question to see if they will respond with an answer and start a dialogue with you.”

5. Give the People What They Want

Make the road to Patientsville as smooth and easy-to-navigate as possible.

Answer the Questions

This starts with just the basics like answering questions that are included in the initial inquiry. Zupko points out how frustrating it can be when a staff member’s email responses continue to direct people to the website instead of just taking the time to answer the question directly. To combat this, a staff member must read what the inquirer has written and respond appropriately instead of using scripted or canned answers.

“If they ask about recovery time, or say they are concerned about pain, or ask about the techniques the surgeon offers for breast augmentation, explain them. Not answering patients’ questions is a sure way to annoy them— and being annoying is not a winning marketing technique.”

“I don’t know” Is Better Than No Response

If you don’t know the answer to a question, say you’ll find the answer and get back to them, so they know you aren’t just ignoring their request. Zupko suggests scheduling a phone call to share the answer to their question which has two benefits. “This feels personal and not robotic. Plus, if the patient will engage by phone you have more opportunity to build the relationship.”

Ask for Permission to Follow Up

Many of us don’t want to feel like we’re pestering someone by following up when we aren’t getting a response. Sheie suggests a simple solution: “Rather than guessing how many times you should follow up, in every interaction get in the habit of asking for permission to reach back out before ending a conversation. It can be helpful to say something like: ‘I’d like to follow up with you in a week/a month/3 months, if that’s alright with you. What’s the best way for me to reach you?’”

Take the Time to Build Trust

Giving the people what they want may include things the patient doesn’t even know they want yet. Trust is being built long before a patient walks into your office. You need to deliver the information the prospective patient needs to feel comfortable and safe. Sheie says “This is a simple recipe of photos, reviews, and accurate price range information.”

Maley agrees, adding the following to Sheie’s recipe:

• A good-looking website
• Videos of you discussing procedures
• Social media posts with lots of personality

6. Embrace Technology (But Use Caution)

It’s important to be open to the changes and trends of technology related to marketing as long as you make sure you use it correctly. A recent example of incorrect use of technology? Chat bots.

According to Zupko “Many patients appreciate the convenience of having a chat bot with a photo of your smiling staff pop up while they are exploring your website. But be careful of the bots that integrate with search and preference engines. Our experience with these is that the way they follow people days and weeks later can make potential patients feel stalked and harassed. It feels like a disconnect to have a chat bot ask about aesthetic procedures while you are searching for gourmet cookware.”

Social Media ≠ Facebook

While Facebook is one social media platform, it’s important to consider working others like Instagram and Snapchat into your marketing efforts. Roos points out that with a more diverse social media strategy you can target a wider range of patient demographics and see growth at a much higher rate than practices ignoring social media. “They also need a different protocol for patients coming from different social media platforms.”

Value Your Email Leads

Olesen warns that email leads need to be taken just as seriously as leads from any other source. These are perpetually connected consumers that are reaching out when the office is closed, while they’re in line at the store, or even in meetings. “While in the past, we might have thought email leads were less likely to schedule, that isn’t true today.”

7. Give Incentives to Book

Motivate patients to book a procedure/treatment or even to just reconnect. Tips include:

Maley suggests you “Give them an incentive to book surgery within a tight expiration date so those on the fence can stop procrastinating, put their fears aside, and just do it (just like hundreds of thousands of others like them do every year!)”

Roos’ advice: “Send a personal invite to a VIP event or new product release.”

And Rangel says to “Take advantage of open houses and invite patients to come and hear stories from other patients.”

 

You won’t win over every client and that’s okay, as long as you try to leave everyone who contacts you with a positive impression of your practice. Sheie reminds us that “Each and every interaction your practice has with the public is how you build your brand. That person may never come in to see you, but when they hang up the phone, they have the potential to tell 100 other people how kind you were—or how rude. “

An NHS project using social media has driven a 13% increase in first time attendances for breast screening in Stoke-on-Trent over four years.

Under the local initiative, information about screening was posted on Facebook community groups, in a bid to reduce anxiety surrounding breast examinations.

NHS Digital said the move empowered women to make appointments and also allowed them to communicate quickly and easily with health practitioners to ask questions about the screening process.

The initiative is part of NHS Digital’s Widening Digital Participation Programme, commissioned by NHS England, which aims to make digital health services and information accessible to everyone.

Across England attendances for breast screening are declining and most recent figures, from 2016-17, show the proportion of eligible women taking up breast screening in dropped to its lowest level in a decade.

According to NHS Digital, in the last financial year 7,938 women in Stoke-on-Trent failed to attend a breast screening appointment, “meaning around 65 cases of potential breast cancer were not detected”.

Through the project, the North Midlands Breast Screening Service promoted their Facebook page on local community groups which their target group - women aged over 50 - regularly visited.

Posts to the Facebook site, which included information such as patients explaining the screening process and videos showing the rooms where it takes place, were designed to encourage women to share them and so spread the message about the importance of screening.

Data on attendances for first time appointments at the North Midlands Breast Screening Service has shown they increased by an average of 12.9% between three-year screening cycles from 2014 to 2018.

“This is a fantastic idea and the community aspect of the group is so powerful that we now have 1,138 followers,” commented Gina Newman, health improvement practitioner at the North Midlands Breast Screening Service.

“We have seen an increase in the number of ladies who have booked and attended their appointments, who might not have done otherwise”.

“The Stoke project is an example of how digital channels can be used to communicate with patients, providing local advice and answer key concern,” said Juliet Bauer, chief digital officer at NHS England.

“This work is part of the NHS’s wider commitment to digitally transform the way we work with all of our patients, improving the information we provide and empowering the public to take charge of their own health and care.”

Healthcare technology has been dominated by electronic health records (EHR) and everything that comes with them throughout the last decade.  The premise of EHRs is to have integrated real-time information that can easily be shared throughout a health system. It was realized early on that, if clinicians can share information with each other, making their jobs more efficient and improving patient care, couldn’t sharing information with patients also improve the quality of care?  And just like that, the need for improving patient engagement was born.

Patients in the information age have an important role to play in their own healthcare experience. However, their input relies squarely on how informed they are and the quality of the information they are receiving.  Can your patients understand the information being shared?  Is the information accurate and easily digestible so that patients can use it to make informed decisions about their care?  Do they have the technical means to engage with their physicians?

The logical place to start thinking about patient engagement is with patients, right?  Actually, healthcare organizations have to examine their internal processes first before attempting to engage with patients.  Sure, there are reasons to get every patient signed up for myChart as quickly as possible, but for the purpose of patient satisfaction and quality care, internal education is more important than jumping the gun with mobile application downloads.

Think of patient engagement as a lifecycle that begins with their first need to visit a healthcare facility.  Why should they choose yours? What do they know about you? What information is available to them and in what mediums?  The people they come in contact with at your facility stand as the primary communicators at this stage and that includes everyone from scheduling, security, and reception, to technicians, clinicians, nurses and doctors involved in their care. Everyone must be informed.

The more knowledgeable your people are about your organization and its offerings, including patient engagement tools, the more comfortable they will be talking to patients and visitors about them.  Equally as important is that the quality of the data presented to patients builds trust both internally and externally. Make sure your people have the tools and information they need to engage patients.

There are numerous ways to engage patients these days and capabilities vary wildly from organization to organization. These can include mobile applications, email, texting, wearable technology, biometrics, and patient portals, among others.  The public drives the market here and you have to go where patients are and use the tools they use.

Currently, email, social media, and text messaging are the primary forms of personal communication.  Mobile push notifications and text messages work best for quick messages while email and social media provide access to patients where additional information can be linked.  Text messages can be used to remind patients about their medications or upcoming appointments as well.

Encourage patients to engage with you as well.  One of the best features of patient portals is the ability for patients to reach out to their physicians directly and ask questions about their treatment.  This feature should not be overlooked as it gives the patient some control in the engagement process and this ongoing conversation between patients and their care team is the ultimate goal of improving patient engagement.

Mobile optimization is a must.  Most people use their phones to send, receive, process and store information. Ensuring that your organization’s website is optimized for mobile capabilities is essential,  as is proving engagement tools on mobile devices, i.e. mobile applications and patient portals.

Some of the most common interactions patients have with their doctor or healthcare practice once they leave the office are appointment scheduling, prescription refills, and bill payments.  A win for patients and clinicians is to provide those capabilities via desktop and mobile applications.  Automating these processes builds trust and appreciation from patients as their time is valuable too.

But it shouldn’t just be patients initiating interaction. Social media provides communication opportunities with patients as well as the general public.  It’s an opportunity to display your organization’s thought leadership, but also show that you’re modern and progressive enough to engage in two-way communication.  Social media, when done properly, allows you to communicate and have conversations with patients, the public, partners, other businesses, etc.  The possibilities are endless.

There are a number of vendors in the marketplace who are working to assist hospital systems with this issue.  Their collective goal is to provide patient’s with information while allowing providers to devote more attention to patient care, resulting in a better experience for everyone.  Patients have the information they need to actively participate in their care and the decisions that must be made, nurses are freed to focus and engage with patients – which is what they do best – and physicians are empowered to reduce costs from an improved workflow, outcomes, and patient satisfaction.  It’s a cycle that all begins with proactive sharing of information and a focus on patient’s needs and engagement.

Even tech giants like Apple are getting into the game as user experience is what they’ve hung their hat on for years. If a user is a patient at a participating hospital, the new features in Apple’s Health app will collect all existing patient-generated data, from over 40 participating health systems and 300 participating hospitals, and display it in a user’s Health app. Apple’s goal is to bring a patient’s medical information right to their iPhone. Given the slow pace of technology adoption in healthcare, the willingness of these institutions to work with Apple is immense.

Improving patient engagement is not only good for the business’s bottom line, it is also good for the patient.  Healthcare is a very real and personal thing and the more information we share, the more personal it becomes.  The more we engage, the more we’re able to partner with our patients to provide the highest quality care for them.  Improving patient engagement strengthens bonds within the community and ensures patient loyalty at a time when patients are starting to shop for healthcare.

Twitter can be an extremely valuable tool for healthcare professionals who want to use social media in a professional capacity. Get some tips and tricks here.

Twitter can seem daunting to first-time users, but it is actually a simple tool that allows you to stay up to date about research and hot topics in your field of medical expertise. It is possible to use your Twitter account only to listen, and to start participating only when you feel truly comfortable with doing so. The character limit has been increased to 280 characters, which means that it is easier to create a tweet.

What is a hashtag?

A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by a hash or pound sign (#) and is used to identify messages on a specific topic. Hashtags are very useful to allow you to follow conversation threads around specific topics, for example a disease type. All medical conferences now also use hashtags to engage Twitter users to tweet about what they have learnt and about their congress experience in general.

Which hashtags are of interest to healthcare professionals?

Symlur, a healthcare social media analytics provider, have created a Cardiology Ontology which provides a list of hashtags used around the world to communicate on different topics: view Symplur’s Cardiology Ontology

Hashtags of particular interest to interventional cardiologists are amongst others:

• #STEMI ST elevation MI
• #NSTEMI Non-ST elevation MI
• #cvVHD Valvular Heart Disease
• #RadialFirstRadial
• #Stroke Stroke
• #TAVI Transcutaneous Aortic Valve Implantation
• #TAVR Transcutaneous Aortic Valve Replacement
• #Heartfailure Heart failure
• #CardioOnc Cardio-oncology
• #cvACS Acute Coronary Syndrome
• #cvCABG Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting
• #cvCHF Congestive Heart Failure
• #AFib Atrial Fibrillation
• #LVAD Left Ventricular Assist Device
• #MitraClip MitraClip

Other hashtags often used by Cardiologists are: #CardioTwitter, #CardioEd, #Twitterati

The anatomy of a tweet

A typical tweet can contain several elements. It can be a simple phrase, but to increase engagement, it's a good idea to include a hashtag, a link, an image and a mention. To find someone's Twitter handle, search for the person's or organisation's name on the web, and add Twitter to the search phrase, for example: "PCRonline Twitter".

1. #hashtags

2. @people

3. @society

4. Image

Practical tips for Increasing visibility on Twitter :

• Asking people to retweet (RT)
• Tweets with images get twice as many retweets as those without
• 18% more engagement for accounts that respond than those that don’t
• Shorter tweets get more engagement than longer ones
• Links receive more retweets than tweets without links
• Use hashtags to increase engagement

The tools of the modern doctor’s kit: white coat, stethoscope, and Twitter. And if not Twitter, then Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or other online forums. Industry estimates suggest more than 90 percent of physicians in the US are actively using at least one social media platform to interact with colleagues as well as patients.

These electronic forums — and the tools that physicians use to access them — serve the same purposes as traditional medical communities. They have become integral to advancing medical education, as well as facilitating cultural evolution within the profession, says Kathryn Hughes, MD, an acute care surgeon at Falmouth Hospital.

“The reach [of online forums] in the medical community is broad, global, and across the entire arc of the medical experience, from student, to resident, to attendings, to thought leaders and industry leaders,” says Dr. Hughes. “It encompasses the entire spectrum of the hospital experience as well as colleges and universities and medical programs.”

General interest physician-only communities, such as Doximity and Sermo, are one manifestation of physicians’ online networking; Doximity estimates that 70 percent of US physicians have used the platform at least once. These forums are complemented by social media initiatives that bring physicians together, often in special interest communities. Facebook’s Physician Moms Group, for example, has become a dynamic forum for women physicians. “These are very fluid and nimble communities that can lay the groundwork for the next community to be created. Significant and real collaboration grows out of them, and they are a powerful way to form connections,” says Dr. Hughes. She and other physicians spoke to Vital Signs about the value of Twitter.

Enduring Goals, Changing Means

More than a century ago, surgeons came together in person to collaborate, support each other, set standards for the profession, and bond over shared experiences, says Dr. Hughes. “Flash-forward to a new millennium. Problems, benefits, and all of the good and all of the bad are bigger in this new electronic format, but they aren’t different.”

In 2015, the American Association of Medical Society Executives noted, “[T]he mechanisms and ways that [medical] communities come together have changed a great deal. New technologies allow physician communities to be built online as in-person networking opportunities are harder to fit into members’ schedules.” In addition, young physicians are technologically savvy and would likely be active on social media platforms regardless of their career choices.

Some physicians find that online interaction can substitute for, or at least complement, face-to-face connections. Michael S. Sinha, MD, JD, MPH, says, “It’s nice to reconnect with the online colleagues you’ve made on a periodic basis. You often feel like you get to know people, even if you’ve never met in real life.”

Moving Medical Culture Forward

The influence of such networks has grown rapidly. Social media helps explore the ways that issues of broad topical currency play out in the practice of medicine. With women accounting for more than half of incoming US medical students in 2017, for example, online physician communities are dynamic forums for discussing diversity and inclusion.

“Virtual discussions have led to an increase in awareness of issues related to gender parity in medicine,” wrote Julie K. Silver, MD, associate professor and associate chair in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School, and co-author of a June 2018 article in the New England Journal of Medicine on the role of social media in advancing women physicians’ careers. “Social media may play a role in supporting these female students, just as it has begun to support women physicians of all career stages, helping them overcome traditional barriers to professional development.”

Dr. Hughes, chair of the MMS Committee on Women’s Health, was a pioneer of the hashtag #Ilooklikeasurgeon, which first appeared in 2015 in an effort to highlight women’s contributions to the heavily male-dominated field of surgery. The hashtag went viral. (The theme was immortalized in popular culture by an April 2017 New Yorker covershowing four masked female faces gazing down at a patient in an operating theatre.)

Facilitating Patient Care

Online networks can facilitate clinical learning. The use of hashtags on some social media platforms enables users to find relevant content and conversations. Dr. Sinha, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, routinely engages in several e-communities on Twitter, including #WomenInMedicine, #HMIChat (transforming health care delivery and medical education), #PWChat (physician well-being), #JHMChat (care for hospitalized patients), and #MedEd (medical education).

Matthew Katz, MD, a Lowell radiation oncologist, turned to Twitter more than four years ago as a means to keep current efficiently with cutting-edge academic research. Dr. Katz initiated a monthly journal discussion for tweeting oncologists, engaging article authors and introducing them and their research to the e-community. He facilitates chats that often attract 50–100 colleagues, researchers, and patients interested in treatment developments related to breast, lung, and brain tumors. Dr. Katz, who is also a regular user of Doximity, is a past chair of the MMS Committee on Communication, which is developing an updated guide to social media for physicians (available imminently on massmed.org).

Patient-Physician Learning

Online learning communities can include patients, says Dr. Sinha. “When patients join the chats, especially topical chats centered around specific diseases like #lcsm (lung cancer), #obsm (obesity), or #bcsm (breast cancer), those perspectives and contributions are tremendously insightful and important for physicians.”

This multidimensionality of online communities is a major benefit to medicine, he says. “Increasingly, it’ll be a way for physicians and patients to engage with one another, to educate one another, and to establish meaningful relationships. It’s certainly not an appropriate venue for establishing a patient-physician relationship, but if used correctly, e-communities like Twitter can allow physicians to walk in patients’ shoes, and vice versa. That’s critically important in health care today,” said Dr. Sinha.

Challenges and Pitfalls

Online forums are not without hazards. Social media can be a time sink; it is important to be conscious of the return on investment. “You have to do it in a way that adds to your clinical practice of medicine,” says Dr. Katz. In addition, any mistakes made in such forums are public.

Protecting Patient Privacy

Participating physicians have the added responsibility of constant vigilance about patient privacy laws. Many physicians who are active on Twitter make a point not to reply to posts soliciting medical or legal advice, and place such disclaimers on their profiles, says Dr. Sinha. “Above all, it’s important for physicians to avoid disclosing identifiable information about patients — and not just because HIPAA says we should. It’s more about respect for patient dignity and personal privacy.”

Online medical communities are working on these challenges. “Social media are potentially very powerful tools for communication, and I am hopeful we’ll figure out through better research a way to use them both ethically and effectively, but I don’t think we are there yet,” Dr. Katz says.

That said, there’s no going back. “We’ve barely scratched the surface of the potential for how social media can be used to bring us together to disseminate information and improve clinical practice,” says Dr. Hughes. “We are in the early stages of seeing where this can take us. I’m an optimist.”

Clinical trials are the engine that feeds innovation for the biopharmaceutical industry. At any given time, 6,000 clinical trials are enrolling participants across the globe — patients with cancers, serious conditions, or one of 7,000 rare diseases. Not surprisingly, enrolling trial participants has become a core competency, required of biopharma companies to complete clinical studies and move on to regulatory filing and approvals.

And still patient enrollment is often cited by companies as one of the most significant barriers to conducting clinical trials.

Failure to enroll sufficient numbers of patients can result in costly delays or even cancellation of the entire trial. In fact, roughly 80% of clinical trials fail to meet enrollment timelines and approximately one-third of Phase III study terminations are due to enrollment difficulties. In addition, 15% to 20% of sites never enroll a single patient.

Here’s the basic truth: Without patients, there’s no trial. That’s why the obstacles and inefficiencies that plague clinical trial enrollment must be reduced via an infusion of technology and a big dose of patient-centricity.

For anyone with an entrepreneurial mind and a high tolerance for risk, clinical trial enrollment presents a perfect opportunity. Here are the steps the industry needs to take.

Widen the enrollment funnel.

The enrollment process best resembles a funnel. It is initially wide, but narrows considerably as inclusion and exclusion criteria are applied and as patient location, availability, and willingness to participate come into play. Interested parties must seek out opportunities to use technology to minimize each potential disruption so that more patients are included at the mouth of the funnel and fewer are eliminated due to logistical reasons.

Understand key stakeholders.

When it comes to clinical trial enrollment, patients want to find out about research opportunities as soon as possible, and they want the ability to sign up or prescreen, ideally online, for clinical studies. They want fewer phone calls, no voicemails, and more control over scheduling and rescheduling screening visits. They want to be able to summon transportation without red tape and access their medical records quickly and easily.

How about clinical trial sites? They want more eligible patients to manifest at a steady rate, a system to organize and track these patients, and support from the sponsor to arrange for transportation or in-home testing.

And the biopharmaceutical sponsors of the research? They want steady progress toward complete enrollment, accelerated enrollment, and to know — in real time — the study’s enrollment status.

Together, these three stakeholder groups can help design the future of clinical trials, a future when clinical trials are efficiently enrolling all over the world. And technology, within and outside pharma, is already helping the industry move in that direction.

Harness digital targeted advertising.

Patients often share that they may not ever find out about a clinical trial. If their doctor is not participating in the study, they say, then why would he or she let patients know about the clinical trial? And how long will it take to inform them?

In the future, every clinical trial will be advertised on mass channels such as Facebook, with targeting so sophisticated any likely participant will be offered the opportunity to participate. But trial enrollers are currently falling short: A mere 11% of organizations currently recruit patients through social media.

Conduct online prescreening.

In the future, it will not be enough to simply inform patients about a clinical trial. Instead, we must provide them an actionable way to prescreen, sign up, and opt-in to be contacted.

While clinicaltrials.gov provides a comprehensive listing of trials, it suffers from two key problems.

One, the study descriptions are not easily understood by the average patient. And two, there is no actionable way to prescreen. At some point, each study should have an online prescreening mechanism that allows patients to find out if they are eligible and, if so, continue the enrollment process.

Consolidate and transfer medical records.

Once we’ve gotten the patient to a screening visit, the next major hurdle is the consolidation and transfer of medical records — two activities that do not occur with any degree of predictability or efficiency today.

For patients with complex or severe conditions, the process may take weeks or months, and oftentimes becomes the responsibility of an already overtaxed caregiver. In the future, we must develop a central, secure repository of medical records that can be accessed by patient or caregiver for easy transfer and use by the clinical trial site.

Facilitate in-home testing.

Just as they summon Lyft and Uber drivers with their phones, what if clinical trial participants could summon nurses to help complete diagnostics and forms required during the screening or later visits?

Patients are often overburdened by the number of study visits and the slew of blood tests and other diagnostics required. Bringing the ones that don’t require a clinical environment right to the patient’s living room would significantly increase enrollment.

The in-home tests could be conducted using an app, a wearable, or a diagnostic device specifically designed for the task at hand. But it won’t happen until regulators get on board with the process, expediting the review of these tracking systems and enabling implementation.

Using our extensive media database, we compiled a list of the top 10 United States social media influencers in the Healthcare space. See how our solutio

When I meet new patients at my clinic, I always ask them how they got to know about Tamira. Everyone has a different story to tell.

They either found us through a google search, an online advertisement, an article that we had placed online, patient testimonials or through patient referrals.

Customers these days are well informed. When they meet me, most of them ask pointed questions which means that they are well researched in the topic.

I have heard from several of my hair transplant patients that they started researching about hair transplant and hair loss control options from the time they started losing hair. This only shows that a huge number of people are now active online and are looking for information online for all their health queries. Moreover, they can get the opportunity to weigh the pros and cons regarding choosing between hospitals or clinics rather than being biased by individual opinion.

According to an article in www.digitalvidya.com, the statistics of online consumer behaviour is interesting when it comes to searching about health related information: 

1. Over 40% consumers say that they look for information online for health related queries and the information they find affects the way they take decisions pertaining to their health. Another research by Demi and Cooper Advertising & DC Interactive group says that 41% of people reported that social media would affect their choice of specific medical facility, hospital and a doctor. Hence, health care professionals should make educational content that prospective customers can review and take a decision. This content should also be made easily accessible on company websites and social platforms.  
2. People in the age group of 18 to 24 are more than 2 times likely than 45 to 54 year olds to discuss health related issues on social media. That does not mean that hospitals and departments catering to 45 to 54 year age category need not invest in digital marketing. Most probably the younger member in the family would be more informed to take a decision for the elderly. Hence, hospitals, clinics and doctors must maintain social media presence and must post informative content regularly. The content needs to be informative and educative about the recent advances in medical field. Not just that, they must incorporate online conversations to keep the engagement going. 
3. 90% of those in the 18 to 24 years category would trust medical information shared through social media networks and search engines. Hence good quality educational information is a must with focus on customer testimonials and reviews. Testimonials and reviews can create a positive mindset in the mind of the information seeker. This can reduce time to decision.
4. 19% of owners of a smart phones have atleast 1 health app on their phone. For those of whom it is relevant, it is important to invest in developing an app, which would make it useful for a customer. The app can be a useful means to stay connected with the patient, feed useful information, fix appointments easily and keep the customer engagement ongoing. 
5. According to MedTechMedia (a leading UK based healthcare magazine), 31% of healthcare professional use social media for professional networking. Due to this reason, Doctors and health care professionals must be active on social and networking sites. Doctors referrals can be a good source of patients. 
6. Google’s Think Insights has shown 119% year on year increase in YouTube traffic to hospital sites. Hence, hospitals must creative more video content, be it educational videos or testimonials. 

There are several differences between Plastic and aesthetic treatment discipline and other disciplines of medicine, in terms of how a decision or clinic selection is made.

In plastic surgery and aesthetic treatments

1. The lead time to decision can be lengthy, upto 2 years.
2. Our patients are not sick, and hence they can go shopping for treatments. They visit different centers, meet different doctors, check rates and then decide. Therefore cost of a procedure becomes a deciding factor in many cases. Hence, marketing efforts are geared towards creating a differentiation between your services and that of the others. 
3. Time to decision can vary from patient to patient. From the time a patient takes an appointment with us and meets us for a consultation, we have found that there are patients who have turned up for a surgery within the next two months, and some who have taken over 2 years to make up their mind and come for a surgery.
4. Customer are not open about their aesthetic treatments and wish to keep it a secret, hence they do not seek information from friends and relatives. Hence, our referral customers are very few. 

Due to these factors, in the Aesthetic healthcare industry, marketing is key. In the last few years, we have found that the digital marketing has over taken all other forms of marketing and mediums. The reasons for this is obvious. They are

1. Digital marketing costs lesser than other traditional marketing medium.
2. Easy to start campaigns, stop, control and tweak based on real time data.
3. ROI is measurable and one can ensure that the most effective creatives and the most effective campaigns get higher budget.
4. Brands can afford continuous online presence unlike print media.

Due to the consumer behaviour and due to the online browsing patterns, health care service providers in the cosmetic surgery space like ourselves need to 

1. Be present where the patient is – be it google, social media, quora or health care directories like Whatclinic, RealSelf or Quora.
2. Make content that is educational and informative and is easily available
3. Focus on making high quality videos that are informative
4. Be active on social media and participate in the social conversations
5. Ensure customer testimonials and reviews that are so vital are made available and are easily accessible. Invest in them.

Regardless of Health care reforms, Health care is a business and is an industry. 

For years, hospitals and physicians relied on personal referrals. Marketing was not considered necessary, and in fact was considered unprofessional. Even today, according to MCI rules, a doctor cannot solicit Patients. The rule was made when GST was imposed on cosmetic treatments. By imposing GST, Government of India has categorized “Cosmetic surgery and Aesthetic Medicine” as a luxury service/procedure, while other health verticals are categorized as life saving procedures. 

As so many people are searching for information online and are looking for treatment options, it is imperative that every medical practitioner has a digital marketing strategy that enables them to differentiate themselves and their services from other local providers. 

Tamira leverages Digital Marketing 

At Tamira, we go the full length to leverage digital marketing for awareness programs, demand generation and customer engagement. We are able to accomplish this through our 

1. Carefully designed website
2. Social media presence and campaigns to reach our target audience. We engage with our followers actively
3. SEO and SEM to enable people interested in our services to find us
4. Videos that are informative
5. Great quality content like blogs and infographics that are useful to the prospective patients
6. Customer newsletters that ensure that we continue to engage with our customers. A happy customer can get us more. Also, once a customer is always a customer.

Digital marketing can be a double edged sword

To industries that depend on digital marketing extensively, like the aesthetic treatments space, digital marketing and online presence can be a double edged sword.

• Stringent advertising guidelines: There are stringent guidelines for advertising for our services and treatments on social media sites like Facebook and Google. For example, to promote a weight loss treatment, we cannot use text or images that will in any way imply body shaming or leans towards promoting a certain body type.
• Negative reviews are a bane: Some customers may be fussy and probably they had a one off bad experience, or did not get the result they expected. It may be because they did not follow the post procedure care or protocols as discussed with them. Such customers end up posting testimonials, reviews and comments that are negative. We often deal with unhappy customers who make it a point to leave negative remarks on our social media sites about our service. Once we have a negative remark, it becomes nearly impossible to erase them. These remarks became a threat to companies like us. Many times there are anonymous reviews and complaints. This means that the person is trying to sabotage our credibility. 
• Our competition tries to sabotage our efforts: There have been instances where our competition has tried to post negative reviews about us, or have tried to post their positive reviews on our social sites. In the west and in some centers in India, I understand that customers are expected to sign form that states that if they post negative comments about the center, they are liable to be sued and charged with defamation. These forms are got along with General consent forms for the procedure. 
• Negative marketing: Negative Search Marketing is another aspect that is effecting the way we promote our services. For eg, if you searched for Apple iPhones on google, you will find ads for Samsung, OnePlus, Google Pixel etc. This means that Samsung, OnePlus and Google Pixel are ensuring that when you search for Apple iPhone, you will also see ads for their products. They are seeking your mind share and ultimately are trying to influence your decision. This is called negative Marketing. Nothing wrong with it, but, it means you need to spend more money to stay on top in the competition and grab the eyeballs. No matter how much we spend to promote ourselves, our competition could be resort to guerrilla marketing tactics, that are detrimental to us.

What’s next with digital?

As there are advancements in the Aesthetic treatment space, robots enabling hair transplants and 3D printed hair as replacement for lost hair, I am sure there will be advancements in the digital space as well.

Here are some of advancements that I am looking for to:

• An Online listing of board certified plastic surgeons: This is the need of the day. There are several surgeons operating aesthetic centers without relevant educational background and licenses. I wish there is a portal that lists names of all board certified surgeons with their educational qualifications, licenses and affiliations with the governing bodies relevant to their field of practice. This way, the unqualified doctors and quacks will be out of the list. It will become common practice for general people to look up this list and verify the claims and reviews before setting up an appointment.
• Artificial intelligence can pave the way for intelligent ad campaign management:Like in all other fields, Artificial intelligence can play a role in digital marketing as well. May be there is a way to target digitally all individuals who are looking at a picture of a beautiful nose…may be they are considering a Rhinoplasty. 

There can be many more possibilities. There are interesting days ahead.  

Last week, Tamira Life was declared winner in 3 Single speciality Center categories for Plastic and Cosmetic surgery, Dermatology and Trichology in the Times of India All India Lifestyle Hospital and Clinic Ranking Survey 2018.

We have been declared:

• No. 1 in the Cosmetic and Plastic Surgery
• No. 2 in Dermatology
• No. 3 in Trichology

We owe our success to our digital marketing efforts and our entire marketing team. Without their dedicated effort the 1, 2 and 3 ranks would not have been possible.