Consumers of health care – Informed Care Seekers – have an array of information never before seen in history.  According to Comscore, in 2008 health information sites grew four times faster than the internet and were up over 20% from the previous year.  This means that more than ever providers of health care products and services must find ways to rise above the noise.  This is a touchy subject, people get real uncomfortable with the idea of marketing healthcare – after all that’s what the term “snake-oil salesmen” was all about.  In a recent NY Times article on hospital marketing, bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn asked “do we really want to treat health care like other consumer goods?”  That’s a great question – but I think it’s already been overtaken by the vast sea of information out there. 

For me, the question is, “in all this growing noise, how consumers get the right information?”

Every hospital should be working to establish on on-line presence.  This doesn’t mean a facelift to your website, or banner ads with a “stud-doc pose” in front of a da Vinci Robot – it means taking all the great knowledge you have about your market and developing content that is meaningful and relevant to them – then putting out where they can find it in the context they expect it to be in.

Identify who it is you need to communicate with.  Understand what content will resonate, and then identify the best way to reach them.  Don’t be locked into your site.  Contribute to blogs, build an interactive component to your site, start a podcast, and leverage communication channels that already have an established audience that meets your needs.  The goal is to get your content seen and create brand advocates – it doesn’t have to happen on your site.

It’s not a question of should hospitals do this.  The reality is that if they do not, they become irrelevant and commoditized.  Step up and extend your brand.  It won’t happen overnight, but it won’t happen if you don’t engage.

Here’s an example.  Being a surgical broadcaster, I keep track of surgical video appearing on the web.  I recently found a tweet that told me to check out a video of “Robotic Removal of Prostate Cancer”.  The tweet came from the UCLA Health System, so I thought I was in for a treat.  What I found was completely out of context.

I found a well produced video with limited viewership, on a communication medium so cluttered that more than 15 hours of video content is loaded each minute, surrounded by singing australian, french speaking prostate related video, and some prostate gag films (really?).  A little exploration, I found they had a nice UCLA Health System channel, but by that time I would have been off chasing the dog related content suggested at the end of the video.

Exploring their YouTube channel, I found that they simply weren’t getting good viewership numbers.  Twenty here, fifty there, but it was good content – really informational.  Was it just bad luck – not yet “viral”?

It’s not luck, it’s context.  It’s knowing where you expect to find your audience, and understanding what it is they’re expecting when they arrive.  It’s understanding the nature of where you’re placing your content, and adapting your presentation to fit the culture of the site.  It’s also knowing how your content will be presented in the site – what other content, or advertisements, will appear beside it.  Can your content be found? If it is found, will it be seen in the context you need it to be seen?

The whole UCLA channel is well produced case study/PSA video – it would have been better placed on Vimeo, where the viewers are looking for well produced video, and they would have had a much nicer player to embed on their site.  They could have tagged it Da Vinci Surgery, so all the videos surrounding it at least had a robotic surgery theme.  Or rather than attempting to shape the context, they could have placed it in a branded channel like ORLive, where it would have been surrounded by surgical videos being watched by medical professionals and informed care seekers – which I believe was their ultimate target audience.

Context matters. 

Context is king.