Based on feedback received from attendees at recent events, Greystone has decided to expand our educational offerings and create a Webmaster Workshop Series for 2012. The Series is designed to meet the needs of a variety of individuals with different skill levels.
Free is good, especially when it comes to marketing your hospital or health system. So you jump in with free opportunities to display your brand through social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter; then you start a blog and then all of a sudden, it doesn’t feel so free anymore.
Greystone.Net is pleased to announce the launching of our new Healthcare Internet Conference Web site! This year’s 15th Annual Greystone.Net Healthcare Internet Conference will be held on November 7-9, 2011 at the JW Marriott Orlando Grande Lakes in Orlando, FL. The Web site is dedicated in providing all the information necessary for a successful conference experience.
ROI is very important to any organization when defining the efficiency of an investment. Intranets are no exception and organizations believe ROI is very important, but defining what an organization wants to measure can be difficult to determine.
I do, and so do 63.2 million others.
Health content is essential to the success of a hospital’s Web site. If a patient or user is searching for information on a particular diagnosis or treatment but are unable to find relevant information on your Web site, they will not only visit another site, but their experience may also leave a lasting negative impression of your organization. As a user, if I could not find relevant, in-depth information about bone cancer on a Web site, for example, I would assume that the hospital does not have the necessary services to treat me, or that it is simply not a very sophisticated hospital. Most purchase this type of content from a health information vendor and some even create their own content. Regardless of how it is obtained, the key is to provide some type of health content on the Web site; which can be evaluated using the following questions as a guideline:
One of my responsibilities here at Greystone is to assess hospital and healthcare system Web sites. When we complete an assessment, we use a grade system to determine the quality of a Web site. Thirty-one categories are evaluated using a consistent and quantitative scoring system, and we assign grades to each category ranging from an A to a D-. You may be wondering, why no F’s? Giving an F to a client is like wearing high heels on a hiking trip: you just don’t do it, unless you want to endure the repercussions.
In case you are not aware, social media has invaded our web space. Transparency is popular and public health information is being shared. I find it amazing that the Internet is the number one source for educating one’s self on health related topics, even more popular than asking your own doctor! Wow, we have become an empowered bunch of know-it-all’s. Well good for us! We are, in fact, a generation of web savvy multi-taskers, able to simultaneously watch TV, surf the web, listen to music and talk or text on our cell phones. (Well, not me but the rest of you people out in cyber-land). We make decisions based on our network of friends, not traditional ads which is good because studies have shown that “groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.” (Surowiecki J.) So, we are, therefore, at the very least, know-it-all populaces in training.
Because of this societal change, more people are seeking social networking virtually, either in lieu of on in conjunction with live, face-to-face networking. Blogs, vlogs, vodcasts, discussion boards, forums, RSS, wiki, Facebook, Twitter, avatars, Flickr, Second Life, Technorati … overwhelming and seemingly never-ending. Yet, despite its monster type appearance, social media is worth taming and incorporating into your hospital strategy. Here’s why – MySpace, 100 million users, Twitter, 2 million tweets a day, Wikipedia, 2.4 million articles. So many people to reach, so little time. Are you ready?