Month: November 2017

Automation in the healthcare industry – Massive Benefits

Posted on by admin

Weeks back, we shed light on the growing importance of digital marketing in healthcare industry. No matter whether you run a corporate day surgery or a clinic, digital marketing and automation are becoming must-have elements for practitioners and medical service providers.

Let’s understand the need for automation in the healthcare industry

If you are from the healthcare industry, probably you would have started taking help of automation.  And, if you are little hesitant about why you need automation in the healthcare industry, read through this article. There are numerous benefits of using automation in the healthcare industry.

A small exercise: Which scenario intrigues you more?

Scenario A:

John runs a dental clinic. He has employed 4 full-time nurse navigators. On average, they spend their 12 hours a week in attending phone calls, booking appointments, and maintaining excels of patient data.

Further, both in-house and outdoor patients are highly dependent on nurses for their treatments and related care. Obviously, nurse navigators have dual responsibilities of taking patient care and maintaining data. And hence, John can get very little quantified feedback data from their reporting. Since there is not much of actionable data to analyse, there are no corrective systems in place.

In spite of sufficient staff, John is not professionally satisfied. The reasons were quite a few. Nurse navigators are spending more than required time on repetitive and monotonous tasks.  Also, he is unable to provide a personalised touch to his regular patients who lose their track during on-going treatments.

Scenario B:

John is advised to take help of automation to ease his pain. After employing business process automation in his dental clinic, he could lessen his fixed salary costs. Now, he has employed 3 full time and 1 part-time nurse navigators.

Further, when his patients go off track in taking their care from home, through self-service tools, he provides them with automated alerts. These alerts help them bring back on track.

The systems which he employed are user-friendly and provide him with immense ease in knowing real-time patient data.  With the help of actionable feedback, he is able to gauge what concerns can be addressed that results in an overall increase in his ROI.

What is your take on these two scenarios? For sure, you will like to have an environment similar to Scenario B for your clinic/practice. The reason behind the differences in the environment is nothing else but “automation.”

It is the right time for you to realise the need of automation and get ready to tackle with new processes. Take a quick glance at some of the most prominent benefits of automation in the healthcare industry.

Benefits of automation in the healthcare industry

Increase in labour efficiency

Whether you run a day surgery or a small clinic, you need to carry out lots of stuff on a daily basis. A large chunk of routine activities is monotonous. Moreover, activities like processing insurance payments, transferring lab reports to the appropriate clinician, scheduling patients’ appointments, and compiling medical records and charts are routine admin tasks.

If you apply automation for these tasks, imagine how easy it would be for you. In addition, the entire labour work can be done in a few clicks and in much better-synchronised manner.

There is a common fear among practitioners and day surgery owners. They fear that implementing automation might hurt employments. But, this is not the case. Reduction in labour costs does not directly imply lay-offs in mass. In fact, medical centres, clinics, and day surgeries will still require people to get trained on how to automate monotonous tasks that result in efficiency and higher productivity.

Reduction in waste

Automation can efficiently boost the connection between nurses and patients. Nurses don’t need to spend their much of time in admin activities. Hence, nurses can better invest this saved time inpatient care.

On the other hand, usage of various papers, worksheets, registers, and others result in immense workload leading to a lot of waste. Automation can save all this is quite an effectual manner. A Texas hospital study found that greater automation in the areas of medical records, order entry, and decision support appeared to result in a reduction in deaths, complications and cost.

Increased certainty of results

Automation not only eases your admin activities, but it also helps patients to remain on track throughout their treatment tenure. With the help of automation in the healthcare industry, you can send your patients regular reminders of their next due treatment of consultation. You can also send them health tips, precautionary measures, or any other dos and don’ts related to their ongoing treatments.

On the other hand, since patients follow a standardised care path as directed by your automation services, most likely they will stay on track. Even if they get deviated, there are high chances of them coming back to track due to regular reminders. And hence, treatment outcomes will be quite close to your predictions.

Insights based on data rather than presumptions

Automation in the healthcare industry can make your lives much easier since you can get data-driven insights. Through properly integrated systems, you can get real-time data and continuous feedback. These two elements play a major role in performance enhancement and process optimisation.

Click to read more on: What is Marketing Automation?

Closing thoughts

The above listed expected benefits are just a glimpse of the overall picture. Once you get started with automation in the healthcare industry, you will be able to enjoy the beauty of automation services.

Digital marketing in the healthcare industry

Posted on by admin

Every company needs a digital plan, but some sectors are more suited than others for digital marketing. Lanre Onibalusi

You’d be surprised to know that these industries are nailing themselves when it comes to digital marketing.

  • Legal (law firms)
  • Healthcare
  • Automotive
  • Entertainment
  • Food and beverages

Let us specifically talk about digital marketing in the healthcare industry.

Most of us have grown up seeing offline healthcare marketing through the means of banners in public places, radio ads and testimonials in newspapers, promotion of medical camps on television, and organised special health camp by hospitals and clinics.

However, the era has changed. There is a major revolution in terms of online presence and digital marketing in the healthcare industry.

Why digital marketing in the healthcare industry?

“Searching for health information is the 3rd most popular online activity”

All those info that is searched online is possible to market online. Nowadays, people surf the internet not only to find businesses or service providers but also to look for solutions to their problems online. Digital marketing includes mobile marketing, content marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, and more.

Since digital marketing is inexpensive as well as an effective way of marketing when compared to traditional methods, the healthcare industry cannot miss out on digital marketing.

digital marketing healthcare industry

Digital marketing trends in the healthcare industry

Both ‘who’ and ‘how’ of marketing strategies in the healthcare sector are getting affected. Hence, there has been a revolution in the role of physicians and practitioners as decision-makers.

These are the top-most digital marketing trends for the year 2018. Every healthcare marketer should evaluate these trends while determining the digital marketing strategy.

1) Transforming roles of self-employed doctors as paid employees

Decades back, certified healthcare professionals were proud to hang their signboard outside their newly opened clinic. However, over a period of time, this profession has also seen chunks of progression. Now, doctors are becoming employees. Many physicians and practitioners prefer to work as an employed doctor at corporate hospitals. They get handsome salaries rather than risking their own finance by opening own small private clinic. The number of physician practices owned by hospitals and health systems jumped 86% from 2012 to 2015, according to a survey conducted by Avalere Health for the Physicians Advocacy Institute (PAI).

On the other hand, it is also a win-win situation for corporate hospitals who have invested a huge amount of finance in infrastructure. When hospitals successfully gather the right mix of salaried front-line doctors and specialists under one roof, they can offer cost-efficient and coordinated patient care.

When doctors become employees, they lose their decision-making ability to selling medical services and products. Hence, such corporate hospitals need to look for ways to market their services online. In addition, these hospitals race to employ good physicians. This is also one of the most important factors affecting the need for online presence.

2) Consumers (here, patients) are now ardent researchers

How many of you have researched online the drug content prescribed by your physician? Almost all of us do this. And, it’s nothing wrong in it.

84% of patients use both offline and online sources for hospital research and 44% of patients book an appointment who research hospitals site on a mobile device.

Rizwan Ahmed

It is not that patients don’t trust the doctors. But, they do not blindly start undergoing medication until they get convinced. They prefer doing their own homework on the research of their symptoms, prescribed medication, available treatments, available hospitals, and the tentative tenure of getting cured of it.

Consumers’ awareness towards the healthcare sector also boosts the digital marketing needs for service providers like clinics and hospitals.

3) Targeted marketing of healthcare industry

As said above, it is all about ‘who’ and ‘how’; whom to market and how to market rather than what to market. There are various audiences for the entire healthcare industry. Target market could be segmented as patients, practitioners, clinics, hospitals and similar others. Once the ‘who’ is identified, it comes ‘how’ to do digital marketing. Numerous Healthcare consumers now rely on the internet for health-related information. Similarly, many physicians research on smartphones for medical studies and the latest updates on the technologies.

4) The growing importance of digital channels over traditional marketing

Almost each and every industry sector has joined hands with digital marketing to top on SERPs. Healthcare industry is also not an exception here. According to MM&M study, the greatest growth for the biotech, medical, diagnostics, and pharmaceutical device marketing budgets is taking place in digital sales material, mobile apps, and social media.

Consumer marketing tactics are greatly transforming to digital ads, mobile apps, and social media. Hence, this shift towards digital marketing in the healthcare industry is no wonder.

At last!!!

The global healthcare industry is growing at a promising growth rate where digital content plays a significant role. Healthcare industry is rapidly adopting digital marketing strategies to exercise various tools and make a huge impact, both globally and locally. A well-organized, better targeted, and effective strategy of digital marketing in the healthcare industry can easily drive lots of organic traffic. Keep reading blogs; soon we are going to publish a digital marketing checklist for dentists. This checklist will help dental digital marketers to audit their current internet marketing efforts and explore new avenues of their online marketing strategy.

5 SEO mistakes to avoid for e-commerce sites

Posted on by admin

The growing usage of smartphones has transformed businesses and lives drastically. Be it hiring a cab, buying clothes, ordering food or availing services online; everything is just a click away at really cheap rates. And, the e-commerce market is expected to grow at a fast pace in the coming years. According to AT Kearney 2016 report, the e-commerce market in GCC countries is expected to grow to US$20 billion by 2020 from $5.3 billion in 2015.

e-commerce sites come across various SEO challenges that obstruct their efficiency. There is a need for business owners, marketing managers, and SEO experts to know these problems; and plan accordingly for their solution. I have jotted down 5 on-site SEO problems which hold back E-commerce sites from delivering to their optimum.

on-site seo

5 SEO problems that hold back e-commerce sites

1. Product description not clear:

Usually, e-commerce sites have a considerable number of products. The quality of a product description can either make or break a sale. It is common for product descriptions to be really short, manufacturer based and automated. With short and automated descriptions, the search engine has limited information.

It is seen that sites with a detailed description of products perform better in search results on all popular search engines. e-commerce website owners should try to include a piece of detailed information; that a shopper needs, to make a decision of purchase.  Also, it should be kept in mind to follow the best description format for the products, such as bullet points.

QL Tip: It is advised in general that 350 and 400 words would be enough to describe the main features and benefits of a particular product.

Apart from adding the product description in detail, you can also add blogs to the e-commerce website. Blogs could include keywords that are needed to improve the overall ranking of the website. Backlinko analysis of 1 million search results showed that the average Google first page result is 1,890 words long.

2. Reviews not included on the site:

The user reviews about the product or service affect the search results.92% of consumers now read online reviews.

CLICK TO TWEET

The impact of adding user reviews is clear and unambiguous. By adding reviews, we can’t say that SEO ranking will improve solely because of getting more reviews. For example, an analysis of over 30,000 businesses was conducted by Yotpo. These businesses added user reviews to their site and measured how this impacted organic search traffic. Within nine months after the implementation of reviews, they found that Google page views per month grew by 30%.

If you also fear of not including user reviews due to negative feedback, then please include it, the results are almost sure to be positive. Also, it will uplift sales. Reviews produce an average of 18% uplift in sales.

3. Improper migration strategy of e-commerce platforms:

Most of the e-commerce sites are built using third-party platforms. This is because they want to focus more on their core business rather than web development.

Sometimes websites outgrow one platform and switch to another as their market shares increases. Also, they switch platforms to gain access to previously unavailable features.

ecommerce-attributes-the-customers

Well, switching platforms can hamper rankings. Many companies wait till they finish the migration of e-commerce platforms and then go for SEO. Don’t do this mistake. Whenever you make any changes in your e-commerce platform, make sure that an SEO professional is always involved in it from the beginning.

4. Not able to develop informational content and focusing more on transactional keywords:

It is very important to add informational keywords that would be able to target the customers who are a bit further up in the funnel. Sometimes, focusing too much on certain keywords usually falls under the failed strategy. For example, it is very difficult to rank for keyword “money”, but this doesn’t mean that you can entirely neglect it.

Apart from adding informational keywords, you should perform a site: search in order to find out which page on-site already ranks best for any given keyword.

Ranking for less competitive phrases adds to the traffic along with improving overall reputation with the search engines. This might be because it influences behavioural metrics. You can take help of SEMrush to find keyword difficulty. When you analyze your existing rankings to see which keywords are already performing well, you can make changes to optimize for those keywords.

QL Tip: Look for keyword rankings in Google Search Console or SEMrush to identify keywords ranking on the second page or so. If these keywords are ranking without being optimized, take them as a golden opportunity and capitalize on them.

5. Site redesigns which are poor:

You might find sites, that, after redesigning gained traffic and also those which lost all the traffic because of it. The latter one is more painful, a redesign was done to beautify the site, incorporating new features. If you redesign your site, without considering SEO, then this is bound to happen. Those pages that were ranking well can get vanished, the content might get changed; thereby, turning a win-win situation to a lost one.

Whenever you change URLs, make use of 301 redirects. This will retain the link popularity that is attributed to the site and help the transfers to the new URL. The 301 redirect shows that indexed URL has moved. The search engine then de-index the old URL and index the new one.

It is advised to create a benchmark metrics including rankings of the site, home page rank, domain authority, and the no. of pages that are indexed in Google with the site: domain.com search. This will be beneficial for comparisons post-launch.

Concluding Lines:

Start looking at your site and take out problems, if any, related to the information that you have provided on your website. By analyzing the problems and fixing those on time, you will able to rank high in the search results of search engine.

Your valuable views are most welcome in the comments below.