In case you were wondering why my posting had dropped off, I was getting ready for the 12th Annual Healthcare Internet Conference and my vacation I’m taking after it.

The first day of the conference Community Health Network won the Greystone.Net Best In Class Innovator’s Award.  I was very surprised that we won this award.  In the past we have received the redesign and clinical content integration awards which we unfortunately didn’t win this year.  When you’re working on these projects from day to day, it can be hard to step back and see the innovation involved.

Community Health Network won based on our new mobile site, new find a physician application and the myCommunity card program.

Here is the text that was submitted:

We recently created a mobile site for eCommunity.com at http://mobile.ecommunity.com. The mobile site includes content and several applications that were redesigned for usability on a mobile interface, including Find a Doctor, Online Prescription Refill, Pregnancy Text Messaging program sign-up, health library, medication guide and facility contact information. Redesign considerations included the length of content pages to avoid scrolling and constraint of content to a narrow screen size. Small images were used sparingly to assist with page layout and download. Applications were also redesigned to require few date entry fields.

Our most important consideration was (and is) “Does this content make sense in a mobile format?” For example, the mobile site could house the full-featured version of our Find a Doctor application, including the ability to compare physicians and request appointments, but we realized that a patient would likely not be doing that on a mobile phone. Instead, a patient is probably more apt to need to look up a doctor’s phone number, location, office hours, and so on. Moving forward, we will continue to keep users in mind during evaluation of the usefulness and presentation of various content types on our mobile site.

We created a new version of our Find a Doctor application. This application is an excellent marketing tool for physicians and health care organizations. Our application provides a service to patients and physicians by offering various search options, physician comparisons, and search engine optimization along with a Google maps mash-up.

myCommunity cards were issued to all current myCommunity members earlier this year and are issued to all new members from now on.  The card entitles the member to receive discounts at area retailers and will be used to identify myCommunity members who use it for express check-in at select locations within the network. The card also facilitates linking between patient data in the EMR and personal health record data (patient-created) to minimize the repeated completion of forms collected by various network entities.

http://mobile.ecommunity.com

http://www.ecommunity.com/physicians/

http://www.ecommunity.com/card/