Where Do You Stand?

This week I have the honor of attending the Forum for Healthcare Strategists annual meeting. Participants largely include the leading healthcare marketers at hospitals and health systems throughout the country. In the opening session, Jay Silverstein, chief imagineer at Revolution Health spoke. He chided the audience’s low participation in social networking and talked about what he perceives as the imperatives for the healthcare industry to change and become more consumer centric. Much of what he talked about has been discussed among product marketers for a few years now, but his company, founded by Steve Case of AOL, is putting these learnings to work in an industry that often believes it is different from any other industry, meaning the innovation happening in the rest of the world doesn’t apply.

I worked briefly in the healthcare industry and found Silverstein’s characterization of the industry to be 100 percent on target. It’s part of the reason I did not stay.

In his talk, Mr. Silverstein offered some tips to the audience. Of those he offered, the most interesting was to “open up your garden.” He asked audience members whose web site linked to somebody else’s in the room. From where I sat, no one raised his or her hand. (Maybe someone sitting behind me did.) He explained how these linkages were so important to search. Again, nothing new to us, but to this industry, it is a pretty big stretch. These hospitals compete with one another for patients. From their perspective, why in the world would they want to promote another hospital? But, as Mr. Silverstein points out, think of the consumer first. If, for example, your child has been diagnosed with a rare disease, why shouldn’t your local children’s hospital direct you to an online community of doctors who specialize in this disease, whether or not they are affiliated with your hospital. As a consumer, you will give your hospital credit for giving you access to the information you’re seeking and probably become very loyal. He even encouraged participants to think of models of partnership that include revenue sharing.

So, for those of you in healthcare, how can you open up your garden to make the healthcare experience better for your patients?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 9:02 am and is filed under Social Media, Where We Stand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.