Online content strategies key at Healthcare Internet Conference

We are just back from the 17th Healthcare Internet Conference, which was organized by Greystone in New Orleans this year. This was our third year as exhibitors, sponsors and speakers. We had the opportunity to attend great presentations, and we talked to many hospitals around the country about how they are using technology to address their increasingly long list of challenges.

As it tends to be at internet-oriented business conferences, the focus was definitely on online content strategies and improving the patient experience. Many speakers emphasized the importance of making your website a media rich experience (doctors' bios without pictures are ignored by patients) with fresh content created on a regular basis, almost in a journalistic way. Brian Gresh, Senior Director at the University of Utah Health Care, explained that, when hospitals host their own doctors reviews, they can beat the MD rating sites at their SEO games.

Using buyer personas to design user experience was therefore a key topic (the University of Washington used 32 personas when designing their site).  Once you have identified your audiences, author Ahava Leibtag was there to help you engage them and turn them into customers for life. Tips are in her upcoming book "The Digital Crown: Winning at Content on the Web" (you can download the first chapter for free at http://www.ahamediagroup.com/thedigitalcrown/).

Managing content across multiple websites was also a big talking point, especially at a time when teams and web assets are largely distributed. One speaker summarized it this way: "the only thing the 31 departments have in common is the air conditioning system". No wonder our cross-platform syndication solution PushHub got a lot of attention.

With the focus being on having good content on their websites, many healthcare organizations are faced with the challenge of managing content that they syndicate from thought-leaders like the CDC, PubMed or EBSCO, while at the same time developing and sharing their own original content across all of their networks. This can be especially painful when websites are on different platforms.

PushHub seriously simplifies content management across CMSs and networks. Gabriel Tinnaro, Senior Web Developer at a major hospital, summarized it elegantly as being "a content warehouse for you to publish to a variety of endpoints."

Several hospitals even brought their vendors to our booth asking if they could connect their data using PushHub.

To address all of the questions that we received at HCIC, we'll be holding another free webinar on PushHub on November 20th, 2013 from 1:15p-2p EST. If you are interested, be sure to RSVP for the webinar so we can send you reminders and keep you up-to-date with recent improvements.