Proventys CDS Oncology™ is a highly unique and dynamic decision support system designed to meet the wide and varied needs of oncology care. Practices will have a choice of functionality based on their own characteristics, priorities, and current use of other health information technology at the point of care.

With lead generation in mind, the video and website were developed concurrently to educate oncologists and insurance payers about CDS Oncology, providing product details, unique benefits and explanation of the partnership developed between Proventys and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN).  The video provides a top-line overview of CDS Oncology, while the website provides more granular detail and opportunities to request more information or signup for a 30-day free trial.

Because CDS Oncology is a fairly complex product, the video needed to tell a clear and compelling story, taking audiences from today’s challenges in accessing and keeping up with oncology research findings, practice guidelines and the demands of delivering effective and efficient oncology care, to the solutions provided by Proventys CDS Oncology powered by NCCN. The video selectively highlights important reimbursement and guideline adherence topics related to payer initiatives, and how CDS Oncology offers a practical and innovative way for Oncologists to “stay ahead of the curve” by having the most up-to-date guidelines at their fingertips.  This includes real-time alerts when there is a change to the guidelines, giving oncologist the information they need to treat their patients with the most up-to-date therapies.

Results to come, but we do expect the combination of the website and video to provide the Proventys sales team with a valuable set of marketing tools and a steady stream of leads.

We click to send. To friend. To like. To dislike.

But because digital communication is so easy – and cheap – it has a HUGE downside. Especially when marketers overdo it (and most fall into the trap).

According to a report by social media and e-mail marketing services company ExactTarget, more than 90% of consumers unsubscribe, “unlike” or stop following brands because of too frequent, irrelevant or boring communications.

And we’re not just talking about filling up inboxes with emails.  We’re also talking about social media overkill.

It’s easy to see how retail marketers can be seduced into over communicating. But it can happen to healthcare marketers as well.

Deteriorating health

When consumers first engage with a health care, pharma or medical device brand, everything is rosy. But as the relationship progresses, the frequency and quality of interactions determine if the relationship will go to the next level (e.g. a visit to a doctor to learn more, a recommendation, or even brand advocacy).

Once the relationship becomes unhealthy, consumers will actively break off contact with the company…or just ignore their communications entirely.

When it comes to email, you might be surprised to learn that 67% actually take the time to unsubscribe (that’s a lot of pent up anger and frustration).

According to the study, there are a few common mistakes that lead to severing digital ties from a brand. Communicating too much with too little to say definitely is near the top of the list. But there are other mistakes brands make:

No engagement. Lack of follow-through sends a clear message that you don’t care. This is true whether it’s email, facebook or twitter.

Too self-promotional. Consumers expect brands to promote themselves. But if you don’t think patient-centric it’s over.

Lack of clarity. Consumers want to learn as much as possible about a product or service related to their health. If the product information is unclear, incomplete, or difficult consumers give up.

Bad e-tiquette. Every channel has its own rules, and consumers expect companies to know the rules and follow them. If you don’t honor them, it means you don’t care. And care is half of “health care.”

What would Shakespeare do?

The phrase “too much of a good thing” is from Shakespeare’s As You Like it. I can’t help but wonder what the bard would have done with the internet. In my heart I believe he would have resisted over communicating. After all, this is the same man that wrote: “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

(I’ll give you a moment to read that again.)

Our Agilent Technologies account team brought Professor Doug Guarnieri into the office to teach us about the complex topic of genomics, a key area of our client’s product portfolio. During his enlightening 3-hour lecture, I was amazed at how deeply Doug understood his field. Amazed and a tad jealous.

Advertising copywriters like myself aren’t able to spend 20-plus years digging deep into one topic. Frankly, we’re lucky if we get 20-plus minutes. Like most multi-taskers in the world, copywriters have to be mini-experts on a range of topics – and be ready to flip the mental switch at a moment’s notice.

Like most multi-taskers in the world, copywriters have to be mini-experts on a range of topics.

For example, in the past two weeks I’ve written about atomic spectroscopy, chemical analysis, chromatography sample preparation, breast cancer, international and domestic adoption, sustainable municipal bonds, retirement income, health insurance, home equity lines and, last but not least, free ATMs!

On the one hand, it’s fascinating to learn a little bit about a lot of things. It’s one of the reasons I love being a copywriter. On the other hand, it’s a challenge to compartmentalize my thinking so I can retain enough information about each and avoid sounding like a complete idiot when writing about them.

So as a writer (and we’re all writers), how do you strike that balance? Here are five ways to get things done on time – and hopefully on point.

1. FIND YOUR VOICE Everyone has a writing style (whether or not you realize it), and that’s a good thing. You don’t want to reinvent yourself every time you sit in front of the computer. The key is to nimbly apply your voice to the topic at hand in a way that sounds fresh, stays relevant to the target and aligns (enough) with the brand voice. This one takes practice but once you get it, you get it.

2. FOCUS ON THE KEY MESSAGE: Deep dives and 3-hour seminars are great, but sometimes too much information is a bad thing. Try to start every project by separating the main point from all the other clutter in your head. Once you figure out the best way to handle that single message, the rest will take care of itself. (Honestly.)

3. LET GOOGLE BE YOUR GUIDE On the flip side, reading more about a topic can often open up a fresh way of looking at it. Whether you’re perusing a 48-page product brochure or searching the vast reaches of the Internet, seek out a different viewpoint or an unusual angle. It may lead you down a new path in your thinking – and bring you closer to getting the job done well.

4. STAY PASSIONATE This isn’t just a writing tip. The more energy you put behind a project, the better you’ll do. It’s easier said than done, I know. Everyone is stretched too thin nowadays. My tip: Fake it, at least at first. Pretend you’re an actor getting into character. Once you’re in the mindset of being excited about retirement income (for example), it isn’t that hard to actually become excited about it. Just close your eyes, take a breath and jump in.

5. TAKE A SCOOP OF MENTAL SORBET Metaphor credit goes to Creative Director Steve Lynch for this one, but I’ve adopted it for this conversation because it’s often very necessary to take a break from what you’re working on. Staring at your screen for eight hours is not the route to Idea Land. So whether it’s flipping that switch to another project or stepping away from your desk entirely, it’s important to clear your head. For my money, a run to Dunkin Donuts (a Runkin, if you will) does the trick every time. Then I get back to the task at hand refreshed and ready to roll.

How do you get things done in your job? Have any tricks up your rolled-up sleeve? Please share them below.

The book talks about a Japanese principal called Kaizen, which means "constant improvement". Research from the U.S. Employee Involvement Association and Japan Human Relations Association reveals that the average number of ideas submitted per employee annually is 100 times greater in Japanese companies than in U.S. companies. Many if not most of these ideas never see the light of day. And, of those which are implemented, most do not result in a huge business change but they help companies fail faster and sometimes reveal new solutions or ideas.

There are many examples across a wide spectrum of professions that have embraced the concepts of making little bets and constant improvement through failure. My favorite example comes from the writers for the humor publication The Onion, known for their outrageous and eye-catching headlines. Turns out the Onion writers propose nearly 600 headline possibilities for their eighteen headlines per week - a 3 percent success rate.

Software company 37signals is another great example. At the height of the web development boom they published a manifesto entitled "Getting Real" which implored developers to reject anything in their process that wasn't "real". Web development teams were learning how to streamline the build process and were investing a lot of energy in describing a web site or application using things that represent the real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) rather than actually building and improving. 37signals found that by building something sooner they could iterate and learn more, faster.

There are many examples across a wide spectrum of professions that have embraced the concepts of making little bets and constant improvement through failure.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos uses a similar approach to develop new ideas and opportunities. Amazon learns and uncovers opportunities as they go. Many efforts turn out to be dead ends - and they're OK with this. One failed feature was able to compare a customer’s entire purchase history with millions of other customers in order to find the one person with the closest matching history. No one used this feature so they removed it and moved on.

Why am I fascinated by all this? It's very relevant to what I do here at PARTNERS+simons. Our project teams offer many small nudges in user experience that represent these "little bets." Many of the work we're most proud of was built through incremental trial and error and certainly that's how most of the great user experience facets are crafted.

Some rules of thumb for clients based on my experience: solicit ideas from your user audience. Embrace a culture of innovation within project teams and don't be afraid to invest at least a little time and energy in trying things out. If they don't work, be ready to adjust. Most importantly, always be open to discovering something we never could have anticipated.

The book is available on Amazon and although I'm not through it can already highly recommend: Little Bets

We have been fortunate to work with some of the smartest advertising agencies over the last decade and a half.  It always amazes me how much talent is resident inside a good agency.  From strategy and creative talents to sophisticated media planning, media buying, and technology executions, advertising agencies provide an invaluable service in the seamless engagement and interactions between brands and consumers.  Due to their versatile capabilities and glamorous associations with the hottest brands, agencies are able to recruit the sharpest minds.  It is no wonder then that these talented souls within advertising agencies are frequently tempted to embrace and incubate new products. While the trend has accelerated in recent years with the advent of a new breed of digital agencies, the phenomenon has generally existed for over a decade.  Let’s examine this in some more detail.

The world has changed dramatically in last few years with the tectonic rise of digital, social, and mobile ecosystems causing massive media and audience fragmentation.

CRM-ification of Agencies. In the late 90s, during the go-go days of the Internet bubble, I was involved in a series of transactions whereby agency holding companies first started their forays into the CRM (customer relationship management) space.  Companies like Young & Rubicam (now a division of WPP Group), Omnicom, and The Interpublic Group realized that the aggregation, analysis, and actionable execution of customer data for superior acquisition and retention were critical to their overall services. These agencies wanted to build and control critical CRM assets internally vs. outsourcing to third party vendors like Oracle, SAP, Siebel and Octane Software.  So we witnessed the first wave of productization of agencies away from their core service offerings: Y&R purchased KnowledgeBase Marketing; Y&R invested in Naviant; Omnicom brought M/A/R/C Inc. in-house; iXL Enterprises bought Tessera Enterprise Systems; and The Interpublic Group purchased NFO Worldwide.

The thesis back then was simple: CRM assets would enable agencies to own and control critical technology architecture offerings while infusing new recurring, product-based revenue streams into the mix.  The verdict is still unclear if these ventures resulted in significant conflicts with independent product vendors or if they positioned the agencies solidly in the growing field of database marketing, data mining, multi-channel analytics and data-intensive reporting.  My personal take is it was a mixed bag of new opportunities and constant challenges.

Advent of Digital Agencies. The world has changed dramatically in last few years with the tectonic rise of digital, social, and mobile ecosystems causing massive media and audience fragmentation.  Industry reports project a digital marketing expenditure of over $100 billion globally by 2015 and mobile commerce accounting for over $25 billion of global spend over next five years.  New breeds of digital, social, and mobile savvy agencies like PARTNERS+simons have sprung up to help their clients navigate this rapidly changing universe through integrated and innovative marketing solutions that can enable them to engage, delight, and interact more effectively with their customers.  The relentless focus on solid and quantifiable results by these new digital agencies draws on their distinct core competency in data-driven science of measurement and analytics vs. both internal benchmarks and the competitive set.

What’s really fascinating is how much of the technology, social, and cultural innovations these digital agencies are now exposed to on a daily basis through engagements with global brands and their opportunities with the new millennial audience.  These digital agencies are providing critical functions of strategic positioning, creative endeavors, technology roadmaps, and open source coding for their client set.

Itching to Productize Again. Thanks to these cutting edge services, age-old brands are starting to connect effectively with their new generation customers through an effective harnessing of digital, social, and mobile ecosystems.  Despite their relentless hard work, cutting edge technology solutions and constant innovations, these newer agencies are starting to realize that their valuations continue to stay within the same old formula of 1 to 1.5 times revenues and 4 to 6 times operating income.  Of course their clients retain the IP of their great work and command much loftier valuations by both public and private investor classes.  Some agencies have been able to brand themselves for the new age and secure higher valuations than others (i.e. Buddy Media, Vitrue, and Context Optional who specialize in marketing brands within Facebook). But they are few and far between.

So it’s natural that the envy train is running full steam when it comes to the remaining group of new agencies with anemic valuations. They are able to generate significant 20 to 40% operating margins, so they are not content to be brandished as “service” companies with labor intensive operating infrastructure.  It doesn’t seem like investors are changing their tune on perception or valuation of these agencies anytime soon.  Even the largest agency holding companies continue to trade in the public markets at below 1.5 times revenue multiples.  They are caught in a valuation spiral. So why not incubate some products through their amazing talent pools and invest in others through small pockets of venture investment dollars? This is a growing trend, consuming a considerable amount of energy of many POM Partners agency clients.

What do we recommend? We have not reached our conclusion yet as to the long-term sensibility of the productization wave.  On one hand, if a specific agency can execute flawlessly on this strategy without creating much of a conflict with their client set, then it can dramatically transform its market positioning and valuation.  The founders can become incredibly successful by using their common sense to innovate and incubate beyond just being a service provider.  On the other hand, if they take their eyes off the pressing needs of their clients and ignore the rapidly evolving technological innovations occurring outside their cocoons, they risk dissatisfied clients and the slow death of their enterprise.  Our advice: tread the path to productization very deliberately and cautiously.  There is a reason the world is divided between service oriented enterprises and product companies.

1. Target

FROM: Target.com
DATE: Monday, April 4, 2011, 6:20 PM
SUBJECT: Important message from Target
OPENING: To our valued guests,
CLOSING: Sincerely, Bonnie Gross, Vice President, Marketing and Guest Engagement

PROS: I give Target credit for being first in line. They’re a smart brand so it isn’t surprising. The email is very subtly branded with their logo tucked in the top right corner, which feels right. What I like most is that they provide three bulleted and bolded tips on how to protect your personal info over email. They also provide an email address for more questions. Finally, the letter is signed by a real person, which adds a big point in the Accountability column.

CONS: Is it just me, or does the use of Target.com in the FROM line feel like a very subtle driver to their website? And why do none of the tips mention avoiding companies that so easily expose your email address? (Kidding.) Overall, I find little fault in this one.

2. Walgreens

FROM: Walgreens
DATE: Monday, April 4, 2011, 9:18 PM
SUBJECT: A Message from Walgreens
OPENING: Dear Valued Customer,
CLOSING: Sincerely, Walgreens Customer Service Team

PROS: Walgreens does a great job of being up front about the situation and assuring customers that “No other personally identifiable information was at risk.” This straightforwardness shows that they have a handle on the situation. Better yet, they include a phone number to call for more questions. I called and got a human being within 20 seconds. Impressive.

CONS: In general, the tone of this email feels very cold. The subject line isn’t urgent enough. The closing signature line isn’t personal enough. The language is off-putting. And while they’re candid about when Epsilon informed them of the issue (March 30), that detail raises a question of why it took five days to tell their customers. As a side note, I’m not even sure how I’m on this list. As one of the few people on Earth who has both worked at a CVS/pharmacy and toiled on their advertising account, I’m a CVS loyalist. But I digress.

3. 1-800-FLOWERS

FROM: 1-800-FLOWERS.COM
DATE: Tuesday, April 5, 2011, 2:17 AM
SUBJECT: Important Information for 1800Flowers.com Email Customers
OPENING: Dear 1800Flowers.com Customer:
CLOSING: Sincerely, Bibi Brown, Director, Customer Service

PROS: This message has the clearest explanation of the problem and what role Epsilon plays in it all. Plus, while the subject line is long, it’s very much to the point. Like Target, a real person signed the message—and if you can’t trust someone named Bibi Brown, who can you trust?

CONS: For a flower company, this message surprisingly lacks any sort of design and is devoid of branding (perhaps to ensure it didn’t get blocked by spam filters?). It feels like a form letter quickly put together and sent out the door. Even worse, there is no way to get more information except through a long, ugly link at the bottom of the email that goes to their standard privacy page. Bibi, you disappoint me.

4. Marriott

FROM: Marriott
DATE: Tuesday, April 5, 2011, 10:02 AM
SUBJECT: Important Notice from Marriott International, Inc.
OPENING: Dear Marriott Customer,
CLOSING: Sincerely, Marriott International, Inc.

PROS: Marriott gets big points for linking to a detailed FAQ page specifically created for the Epsilon information breach. The email itself feels formal but is well written and makes an honest, reassuring statement that “In all likelihood, this will not impact you.” The message appears on their standard letterhead that has a simple shaded effect to make it look like a piece of paper. However…

CONS: …what I find most disconcerting are the buttons at the top of the letterhead: Find a Hotel, Explore & Plan, Marriott Rewards. Really? You’re telling me that my personal information has been violated and you want me to book a room? Sure, this isn’t a serious threat to my privacy, but it’s still not the time to start selling. Then again, what can you expect from a letter sincerely signed by someone with the last name “International, Inc.”?

So what do you think of the responses from these four companies? Have any other brands impressed you over email lately? Any that depressed you? (For example, the email US Airways just sent me with a subject line of “Oops” and a message informing me that the 1,000 bonus miles they credited to my account last week was a mistake. Oops, indeed!) Please share your thoughts below.

Have you noticed this lately? You go to mainstream news sites — like, say, boston.com or our own wbur.org — and see ads (no, wait, in public radio we call it “underwriting”) by local hospitals. I’m not exactly objective about financial support for journalism. The ads gladden my heart. I also couldn’t help wondering: What’s up? In my old newspaper days, you couldn’t sell an ad for a health-and-science section to save your life.

But the world of the Internet is different. Health is among the most-searched-for topics, and all those searches translate into potential patients. Also possibly at work to boost hospital ads: rising competition for privately insured patients and the growth of a smart-shopper mentality among health care users. We don’t have local numbers, but nationally, hospital ad spending has been rising steadily. Here in Boston, you can barely turn on your TV these days without running into an ad about a local hospital or health insurer, whether it’s a Steward “Believe” ad during the Super-bowl or a Partners ad like this one:

I can imagine a lively debate about this phenomenon, at a time of increasing emphasis on cutting health costs. The governor of New Hampshire, Democrat John Lynch, recently complained about hospital ad spending in a budget speech, saying that hospitals were using “excess cash” on ads to grab more patients instead of to cut costs. On the other hand, here in Massachusetts, everyone keeps talking about how certain 800-pound hospitals have a disproportionate share of the market; mightn’t ads help shift that? And to the extent ads convey information beyond pure salesmanship, mightn’t they make for better health care consumers?

I spoke recently with Tom Simons, CEO and chief creative officer of the Boston marketing firm PARTNERS+simons, about the local landscape of hospital advertising. Tom, who is also chairman of the Board of Trustees at Mount Auburn Hospital, predicts that hospital advertising will continue to grow here, further spurred by health care reform, and that the tenor of many ads will change as hospitals learn that “patient-centric” messages are the most effective. His firm has recently worked on campaigns for Tufts Medical Center and Emerson Hospital. Herewith, his analysis, lightly paraphrased:

Why more ads now?

There’s an old saying, “If you want to find a Boston teaching hospital, you look for a crane.” But in fact, today, hospital patient volumes are looking like they are into a downward trend — there’s a lot of discussion about this. This is creating an evolving set of conditions that is resulting in some really aggressive marketing:

-Hospitals are very interested in spending to reach and sell patients who have commercial insurance. These are patients who are more willing to make their own decisions about where to go for care, and their medical reimbursement rates are the highest. They have a large number of elective procedures. Patients with commercial insurance have become more important as government reimbursement rates for those with public insurance (Medicare and Medicaid) have not kept pace with hospital cost structures. But don’t get me wrong, all admits and discharges are important.

-There’s huge growth in the availability of comparative data on hospital quality and safety, patient satisfaction and outcomes. We’re seeing the creation of a health-care-consuming public, and these people are increasingly aware that quality is not consistent among all hospitals, and the highest quality isn’t always where we expected.

-One of the most transformative factors has been the eagerness of people to use the Internet to research where they can get good quality care, research their conditions, and so on. Health-related searches are something like the third-most-common online activity.

So if you just connect the dots, there’s so much search going on online, so much research going on online, and this is a marketing channel that hospitals weren’t using as actively five or six years ago. And they’ve realized that as search increases, they need to make sure that their message is a part of the Internet activity their potential patients are involved in.

Measuring Impact

An additional appeal of online ads: If you’re marketing on the Internet and you’ve designed a bullet-proof program, it’s very simple to measure the performance of the campaign through traffic and session lengths and video views. Most traditional advertising is measured by metrics that are not connected to real audience engagement or business outcome. But fastidious marketers can determine the comparative return on investment of online campaigns with a precision that doesn’t exist in other channels.

Some adventurous marketers are even allowing for appointments to be made online. It’s really simple to connect marketing to value when you’ve got a patient that’s created as a result.

Which Medium?

Seeing an ad for, say, Brigham & Women’s Hospital on boston.com is the equivalent of a print ad in the health section of the Boston Globe. The challenge is making sure your message is adjacent to content that you think your audience is going to be interested in.

Spot TV is a very traditional channel that gets a lot of use by hospital marketers. It’s still a very effective reach tool capable of carrying an emotional message.

Print? It just doesn’t have the eyeballs now. To be honest, we don’t think about it that much. It’s generally not the most cost-effective medium.

The health reform paradox: Cutting costs means more marketing

The indications that I see are that people are taking more control over the management of their own health care experience. We did research a couple of years ago among Massachusetts health care consumers and we found, without any equivocation, that these people say they are much less likely to blindly follow the referrals of their physicians than their parents were.

They’re more empowered. They have more research tools at their disposal. Skepticism is just more pervasive among all of us for all sorts of reasons.

You know from your own reading that there’s a lot of scrutiny of the disparate reimbursement rate structures among hospitals and physician groups – these often don’t correlate to superior quality or outcomes. This is a key payment-reform driver.

We’ve now got global payments and a new set of products coming out that tier hospital and physician groups. Today we have an insurance system that I think of as being free care: you pay your premium and then you get free care whenever, wherever you want. New insurance products are going to become more popular that offer lower premiums for members who get care at hospitals that offer comparable quality at comparably lower cost.

So you’ll have some hospitals, the more expensive hospitals and physician groups, who may not be part of those tiered networks, advertising to build brand value to substantiate their higher costs. I see some laying the groundwork for that now.

And you’ll also have the more reasonably priced hospitals and physician groups who are part of the tiered networks competing against each other for the business that is being routed their way. I think that will cause spending on marketing to increase even as costs are increasingly being managed.

It’s totally paradoxical. It’s incredibly ironic.

A new kind of message

As people become more active consumers, what I think will happen is that the sharper hospital marketers are going to make a distinction between what the hospital wants to say in its advertising as opposed to what the patient needs to hear. You know that hospitals are inclined to advertise the recently opened building, or talk about their world-class care, or their team approach, that kind of thing. Those are fairly simple messages to get through an approval process in a hospital setting. They are intended to make the advertisers feel good about themselvesl.

But what’s important to patient and their families is: Am I going to like my doctor? Am I going to like my nurses? How easy is it going to be to make an appointment? Is parking going to be a pain? Are those hospital rooms noisy at night? And am I going to have just as good an outcome at this hospital as I am at the next hospital? I think that’s a different message than the kind of message we’re accustomed to seeing.

The Tufts Medical Center TV concept is all about making the physicians available in an online environment in which they — in a very real sense — interview for their own hire. The videos are a chemistry test between the potential patient and the physician. In fact, patients can request an appointment online.

I’d also point out that the Emerson Hospital website has a Google map overlay that makes it very easy for patients to get directions to the hospital, and there is a separate smartphone app they can use to get directions to their appointment location within the hospital campus. I think that’s a lot more patient-centric than the heroic shots of some new imaging center or doctors walking down a hallway in slo-mo.

Will hospitals and physician groups tout discounts?

I don’t think any hospital will be willing to say ‘We’re an off-price provider.’ I’m trying to look down the hallway and imagine how varying reimbursement rates will have a marketing and messaging consequence but I’m not sure at this point how it will manifest itself. That said, I’m certain it will be a dynamic that shapes some marketing messages.

How about marketing of “accountable care organizations” or ACO’s, as they form as part of the coming Massachusetts reform?

I think about this a lot in the context of Mount Auburn where the hospital, its physicians and the independent physician group are essentially operating as what we believe will be the ACO model. Whether ACO’s become meaningful to the consumer remains to be seen, but I think that there will definitely be competition among hospitals in the race for the official designation and the business that will follow. I’m not sure the person on the street is going to be thinking, “I’ve got to go to an ACO environment to get my hernia repaired.”

I do think it’s logical to assume that ACO environments are going to attract business that is directed either by government payers or by commercial payers. It’s realistic to expect a better outcome, a better continuum of care, in an ACO environment.

In Deborah Kotz’s piece, the US News rankings editor Avery Comarow is quoted as saying "The new rankings, the largest expansion of Best Hospitals to date, offer patients and their families a much better chance of finding a top-performing hospital in their health insurance network…and for patients who would need to travel to visit a nationally ranked hospital, the metro rankings may offer a local alternative -- or several."

Two things come to mind.

First, this suggests that finding a good hospital in your insurance network is difficult. This does not square with the facts – there are a number of online rating systems whose data have more integrity than the news magazine’s. Moreover, if hospitals don’t meet well defined quality standards, in the future they can appropriately expect to be left out of the networks altogether.

There are a number of online rating systems whose data have more integrity than the news magazine’s.

Secondly, the rankings editor would have us believe that this US News issue is something of a public service. While that’s a noble motivation, I am certain that it’s nowhere near as critical a success measure as ad sales and circulation boosts.

Your mobile strategy might include a mobile application. A report in November by research2guidance estimated there were more than 17,000 mobile health applications designed for smartphones. Mount Sinai Hospital was profiled on Apple's website and has rolled out 66 custom built applications that help manage hospital operations. The Mayo Clinic meanwhile has partnered with a mobile development company and is focusing consumers with applications such as their Symptom Tracker™. You may want to start a little smaller, for example we are building an application that will help a leading health insurance provider facilitate nutrition tracking for it's members as a way to achieve weight-loss goals.The iPhone application is being promoted through local media outlets and helps the company foster a relationship of wellness through the use of technology. Building a mobile application needs to be carefully considered and the various devices certainly complicates the planning. However apps are just one way to leverage the 250 million mobile devices in the US — there are others.

98% of phones in the US can send and receive text messages — it is truly the lowest common denominator.

You might start down the mobile path by simply creating a mobile version of your website. This is become a standard and users are beginning to expect one. Your mobile website should be tailored for mobile browsing and focused on the use cases of your patients and families — e.g., walking the halls looking for departments within your location or other logistically-based scenario's. Delivering a mobile web experience shows a true thoughtfulness for the patient, while also showing a level of technical sophistication and awareness that many healthcare companies strive to project. Patients certainly want to think of their providers as technologically savvy.

One things for sure, your mobile strategy had better also consider SMS or "texting". Outside of healthcare, SMS is continuously being used as the basis for dozens of startups mostly because of its ubiquity — Twitter is probably the most well-known example. Of the hundreds of millions of devices, only about 50% are considered "smartphones" with sophisticated apps and multitasking however, greater than 98% of phones in the US can send and receive text messages — it is truly the lowest common denominator. And believe it or not it also offers a number of unique brand opportunities if you're clever and commit to a user-centric approach.

In healthcare, texting is still mostly untapped.  John Hopkins Children’s Center recently conducted several studies on text messaging in a medical context and found immense benefit this medium can provide. Kaiser Permanente recently partnered with an SMS services company to integrate an appointment reminder system. On the leading edge, South Africa of all places has been using texting since 2006 to notify patients of appointments, changes in schedules, etc. and have saved roughly $0.25 US per communication when compared to other methods.

Your approach to SMS/texting can start as modestly as you wish. PARTNERS+simons has built custom systems that are capable of sending messages automatically to help our clients better communicate with their customers. SMS can also be added to your website experience to send information from your website to a mobile device. Imagine how convenient it would be to send doctor information to your device on the way out the door and using it as a basis for your cars navigation system? We actually did this for Emerson Hospital.

Texting can also be used at community events allowing your audience to send a text to receive information. You've seen these shortcodes on signs that leverage SMS to help with development efforts. Most notably, this was used during the earthquake crisis in Haiti and generated more than 20 million dollars in donations — much of this can be attributed to ease-of-use that SMS delivers. While your company won't likely see success at those levels, you can use SMS to enhance other efforts like auctions, blood-drives, and other community events.

As always it's important to create a mobile strategy and partner with user experience veterans that can successfully create a blend of mobile technologies to achieve your goals, and keep your customers at the center of your design — it's all about their needs not yours.