Exceptional Experiences at Community Health Network

Besides just creative and non-creative people, I think there are two types of creative people:  Those who think of lots of ideas and those who think of ideas that they can execute.  I believe that I am one of the latter.  I have at times thought that I am not a creative person, but I recently realized that I have thought of creative ideas, bringing together concepts, etc. and my ideas are ones that we can create or that we have created.  I build off of work that we have already done or have a vision that I work towards.  Just because I don’t have lots of ideas (including some that can’t be done), doesn’t mean I’m not creative.  One of the benefits of the person who has lots of ideas is that they can inspire ideas in others.  I filter the ideas that I have and don’t spend time working out ideas that can’t be actualized.

I have said this many times.

SEO is easy.

Search engines want to find you, all you have to do is be there. Having said that, until recently, it never occurred to me that a lot of people don’t understand how to do that.

I am not a fool, I know that tweaking SEO can be a challenge, but that is part of the fun.

Dan shared a great article that does a better job of summarizing than I can.

Optimizing your site has to more than buying keywords and getting links, an organizaiton needs to be omni-present, and simulatneously exist across multiple platforms.

SEO is now Google Adwords, Twitter, mySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Plaxo Pulse, SocialSpark, your blog, my blog, and your neighbors blog, as well as widgets and links in comments and message boards, and wikipedia.

That is only the random list I could pull from my brain at 10:00 at night, but one of the best parts of that list is a lot of the work on social networking sites can be done for you by encouraging your customer and employees to use the internet. That could mean blogging, or it could mean creating and encouraging things like Ning sites, facebook groups, blogging, and YouTube videos.

Reading this article on NPR, Internet Health Records: Convenience at a Cost?,  prompted me to think more about Personal Health Records (PHRs) and Electronic Medical Records (EMRs).  In re-reading my previous post The Ideal Personal Health Record, I’m not sure that it was clear about my thoughts.

The other day in a meeting I described the relationship between the EMR and PHR this way:

Think of the PHR and the EMR as two separate entities sitting side by side.

The patient’s PHR can look at the patient’s EMR but is not allowed to change it.  The patient can add items from their EMR to their PHR.  Then they are able to modify that item only in their PHR to add additional details, etc.

The physician’s EMR about a patient can look at the patient’s PHR but can’t change it.  The physician can pull pieces of the patient’s PHR into the EMR as they feel it is appropriate because they are ultimately responsible for the accuracy of the EMR.  The physician is able to modify a patient’s EMR.

The two systems exist separately but are able to communicate with each other.

This system will only be able to work if the PHR is linked to a health care provider’s EMR.  The larger PHR systems like HealthVault and Google Health may be used to transmit data between PHRs so if a patient moves they can take their data with them.

We now have RSS feeds available for our health news! You can select from a number of categories:

• Breaking News
• Breast Health
• Diabetes Health
• For Your Child
• Heart Care
• Men’s Health
• Mind and Body
• Women’s Health

Breaking news stories are published once a week on Wednesdays. News stories in all other categories are published once a month.

Visit eCommunity.com/news to subscribe.

Not ready to subscribe? You can also just listen to the story by clicking the “Listen” link next to the headline.

Tomorrow our team will be hosting a Web publishing workshop. We’ve invited members of our marketing and communications departments, leadership, and others involved in development of our brand strategy. We have also invited a couple of our external partners, Compendium Blogware and Custom Scoop, to discuss Web publishing, in particular blogging as it relates to brand strategy.

We plan to educate a bit on the Web publishing tools we have available internally and how content owners within the organization can use them to publish messages and content in a rapid-cycle manner. Our tools include a homegrown CMS, RSS capability, e-mail marketing tools, interactive/rich media, collaborative software, blogging application, etc.

We’re also going to dive into how we can use our tools to create a more interactive user experience on our Web site—one that integrates our brand message and effectively communicates Community’s services and exceptional experience model to patients, families and employees.

There are many viewpoints and I’m looking forward to a lively discussion with constructive takeaways to help us as we move forward with our content strategies. Stay tuned!

I just finished reading John Maeda’s “The Laws of Simplicity”, and I was struck by an application of one of his laws this morning. I was loading my iPod with some music and I wanted to add my Time-Life “Living the Blues” series to listen to today. I usually load just my favorites from the ~25 CD series but today I wanted to also add the ones that were not ranked five stars. I wanted to listen to some variety and I realized that my favorites weren’t so favorite unless they are contrasted with songs that aren’t my favorites, just like Maeda’s fifth law, DIFFERENCES Simplicity and complexity need each other. Maybe this is the purpose of radio and something that we have lost in the iPod/iTunes/web 2.0-get-what-you-want-when-you-want-it era that we are in?

A crucial piece of our health care technology arsenal is a homegrown content management system (CMS) we (read: I) use for publishing our Web content. After a year of design (and redesign) sessions, the brand spanking new “CMS2008″ is in production! We are still working out some kinks as is to be expected. However, there are many upgrades: The information architecture is more logical, the WYSIWYG-ness is more user-friendly and the editor functionality is more robust.

In addition to the Web content publishing piece, CMS2008 also contains administrative tools that we can use to mange user-generated content, such as that found in our eCommunity blogs, discussion boards, and SharingSites.

The big idea here is that if we can make our CMS tool easier to use, this will help the content owners distributed across the organization feel empowered to also be active content publishers.

Screenshot of CMS2008

Several employees at Community Women’s Health brightened one patient’s day recently when they presented her with more than $350 in baby gifts they had purchased. Angie O., medical assistant, Monica R., sonographer, and Amanda S., biller, gave patient Vanessa bags of new baby clothes, blankets, bibs, bottles, diapers and other infant items along with hand-me-downs from their own children. The co-workers surprised their patient during one of her routine medical appointments.

“She was shocked,” Amanda says about this exceptional patient experience. “She’s not an emotional person, but she was really affected. It was great. And it was fun buying pink stuff because I have two boys.”

“I thought it was great,” says Vanessa. “It was a nice thing they did for me.”

The mini baby shower was Angie’s idea. After talking with the young mother-to-be during another appointment, she discovered that Vanessa hadn’t yet had a baby shower and no one planned to throw her one. Angie enlisted her co-workers to help. “I told them that I was going to buy her some small gifts, but it turned into something bigger,” Angie says. “I just liked her and we wanted to help her.”

Jeanne N., site manager, was the first to share this story. “I am so touched by their generosity.”

I had the pleasure of listening to a lecture/conference call with Seth Godin yesterday talking about his book “Meatball Sundae.”  I began to wonder how the health care industry fits into his model.  At first glance it seems like health care provides a meatball service, but there are unique aspects to it that work well as the whip cream, cherry and other toppings.  Health care and health care technology doesn’t seem to fit into his model.

The e-Business team has seen a lot of new media/new marketing trends that work really well in health care.  Patient blogs are one example that we have built.  Our SharingSite application allows patients to blog about their condition and treatment in or out of the hospital.  We are also using it to post our baby/nursery pictures.  This eliminates the phone calls to family and repeatedly telling relatives the same information by a patient or family member who is already stressed and busy.

Our discussion boards that we have really not promoted are gaining more and more usage because people want to talk about their health condition, ask questions and compare their experience to other patients.  This is a common patient behavior that used to (and still does to some extent) happen in person, but now you can go online and talk to many more people.

Patients also want to find out more about their health conditions so they are using online health information libraries along with just reading blogs, discussions boards, etc to find out as much as they can about their health issues.

I believe that health care is different, that it doesn’t fit the Meatball Sundae model.  Maybe it has to do with all the regulations, etc. on our industry, or that we aren’t selling a product that users generally have a choice about purchasing or not.  But they do have a choice about where to purchase it.

I met with a vendor earlier this week and one of the services they are selling was Business Process Management (BPM).  I realized that the e-Business team has been doing this for several years now, before it was the new thing.  We have been building applications that are designed with the process in mind.  We build applications that improve process and workflow.  Our applications work within the process workflow already created.

On the other hand, IT in many organizations builds or buys an application and fits the process to it, or tries to.  One reason for project failure with applications and vendor product purchases is that they don’t match the process previously developed in the organization.  The project fails because there is an attempt that doesn’t succeed to change the process or the process isn’t understood.

In our requirements gathering we review the current process and sometimes make suggestions to improve the process.  But then take the process requirements and build an application that meets the requirements and matches the predefined process.  I think that is a major factor in our success in this organization and outside it.

I believe this is especially true in the health care field.  The medical staff is very busy and there checks in place that need to be met to insure quality health care.  Processes have been created and in place for some time and it can be difficult to change them.  Health care technology systems generally don’t work together well and there are difficulties with interoperability.  Forcing a system into this environment without considering the work flows and processes already in place will ultimately fail.  Failure can mean a lack of usage of the system, a break down in work flow or issues with patient care.