Medical Marketing Tips ? How to Use a Blog to Promote Your Medical Practice

If you are a doctor and you’re not blogging, the question is: why not?  Blogging is a powerful method of medical marketing that helps you get your name out there, connect with potential patients, and generate more business.  You might be wondering why on earth you would take time out of your busy schedule as a physician to write for free.  Well, here’s why.

For one, if you’re far too busy to blog yourself, you can always hire a ghostwriter to write your blog posts for you, and then review each blog post to ensure that you approve of its content and request changes if necessary.  Secondly, blog posts aren’t difficult to write.  Even if you just take 30 minutes out of your day, you can write a pretty decent blog post.  Blog posts tend to be shorter than other kinds of online articles, and they are written in a casual tone.

Surely, you already have a website for your medical practice.  If not, you absolutely need to get one.  In this day and age, in order to attract new patients, it’s essential for a portion of your medical marketing campaign to be conducted online.  The majority of adults search for health information online and when they need to go to the doctor, they do a quick online search to find doctors in their area.  You need to make sure that you have a search engine-optimized website that people can find when they search online.  People are more likely to trust you and choose you as their doctor if you have a presence online.  Blogs help you expand that presence and give your practice more credibility.

The main purpose of having a blog is to connect with your patients and potential patients.  Now, clearly, you wouldn’t use a blog to talk about what happens in your practice or how your day was.  However, you could use a blog to discuss the latest treatments in your field, recent medical breakthroughs, and other general information.  When people browse online for medical information and find your site, they are likely to trust you as a good source of information since you are a doctor.  This helps you build authority within your medical field as well as online.

Another important benefit of blogging is that you can connect with your readers on a personal level.  Your blog readers will comment on blog posts you write that they find interesting, and you can then respond to their comments.  As a result of blogging, you can connect with your patients and potential patients.  People will think of you as a friendly, approachable doctor rather than one who is too busy to give them the time of day.  This personal connection is important because it helps you attract more patients to your practice.

Blogging is also beneficial because it gives your online presence a major boost.  People aren’t the only ones who love blogs; search engines do too.  Blogs are constantly updated and the search engines like content-rich sites that are fresh and frequently updated.  Furthermore, a blog connected to your main website makes it easier for search engine robots to crawl and index your site.  And most importantly, content is considered king online.  Both people and search engines love great content.  Great content attracts links on other relevant sites and blogs, which then leads to a higher search engine ranking.  Search engines judge the popularity and relevance of your site based on the number of links back to your site that accumulate on other websites.

Blogging also makes it easier for you to participate in social media because you have something that you can immediately share and use to attract attention to yourself and your practice.  By joining a site like Twitter, you can post updates, or “tweets,” each time you write a new blog post.  If the blog posts are good, other Twitter users will “re-tweet” them and spread them across the twitterverse.  Social media marketing is like word-of-mouth on steroids, and when used properly, it can catapult you to both online and offline fame.

So, what are you waiting for?  If your medical marketing plan doesn’t include blogging, consider adding a blog to your current website.  The more you update the blog, the better, but you can even update it as little as once or twice per week if you are too busy to dedicate any more time to it than that.  There are a number of doctors and hospitals that have used blogging and social media to generate publicity and attract new patients, and you can do the same.  Start a blog today if you want to increase awareness about your practice and generate publicity both online and offline.

3 Things To Look For When Choosing Medical Marketing Consultants

Medical marketing consultants provide marketing for doctors. Although most people often tend to consider doctors as separate beings, doctors in private practice are just like other small business people and are seeking out marketing plans. These plans include doctor internet marketing. Doctors today, just like any other small business owner, would be foolish to ignore the internet as a viable media for medical marketing. Until a few years ago, doctors had limited reach when it came to their business. Medical marketing provides medical professionals with an effective medium for expanding their business potential by allowing them to reach out to readers all around the world.

In order to provide the best marketing to doctors, a consultant should not only be familiar with the various internet marketing strategies, but should also have a fair amount of knowledge when it comes to medical services. Here are 3 things to look for when you are choosing consultants for internet marketing for doctors:

1. Proper knowledge of search engine optimization

No matter what great marketing ideas for doctors that a consultant has, they have to first have the basic concept of how internet marketing works. This is of paramount importance. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the use of keywords and phrases that are placed strategically on all content so that the medical website can be picked up by the search engines. Wondering how SEO works? Major search engines send out spiders or robots that Proper knowledge of the search engines and how they work is one of the most crucial things a consultant should know when it comes to internet marketing for doctors.

2. Proper knowledge of the practice

A consultant who provides marketing services to doctors should have a good concept of the generalized medical field as well as the specialized field in which the doctor practices. Not only do they have to be able to provide articles that are optimized for search engines but the articles should be interesting and informative to the readers as well. Most importantly these articles will have to be absolutely accurate. Doctor internet marketing is based on establishing a trust between those who visit the website and read the content and the doctor. Content that is poorly written or even worse, inaccurate, can do more harm than good when it comes to doctor internet marketing.

3. Fresh marketing ideas for doctors

A good marketing consultant should also have some fresh marketing ideas for doctors just as they would for any other client. Ideas for fresh content and website pages are important when it comes to doctor office marketing. The ideas should be well thought out and presented in such a way that the public has a good idea about the services that the doctor provides and how they can help them. These days, video marketing has been gaining in popularity as a way to promoting something. Statistics show that when looking for information, internet readers prefer to watch a short, informative video rather than read through a lot of text.

An increasing number of people today are getting all of their information from the internet, including the opportunity to choose their doctors and medical services. Those who provide marketing for doctors should be aware of all of the latest new developments in the medical field, should be able to provide content that is informative and accurate and will draw peopled to the site and also make use of search engine optimization.

Doctor office marketing is the way of the future for many physicians. Those who want to appeal to a broader range of potential patients are choosing consultants that can provide them with the best doctor internet marketing ideas and plans.

Patient Safety and Medical Tourism

The common question asked about medical tourism is whether or not it’s safe. What is patient safety? How does one gauge whether or not policies, procedures and techniques offered in a variety of medical fields are safe?

 

Even more perplexing, how is patient safety defined in different countries?

The Joint Commission Perspective on Patient Safety
The Joint Commission is a hospital and medical facility accreditation organization based in the United States.  The Joint Commission International is similar and focused on providing quality care and safety for medical practices around the world. A facility accredited by the Joint Commission International is one that:

 

Measures up to quality benchmarked standards
Employs risk reduction strategies
Offers procedures and techniques and treatments in all world regions
Is focused on patient safety standards

 

The Joint Commission International creates International Standards for Hospitals, International Clinical Lab Standards, International Standards For Care Continuum’s or providing quality care across multiple settings such as private homes, long-term care, rehabilitation, assisted living and end of life care, as well as International Standards For Medical Transport Organizations.

The Joint Commission International is client focused and provides guidelines regarding patient safety in domestic and foreign destinations. The basic focus of the Joint Commission’s Perspectives on Patient Safety is to teach and instruct healthcare organizations how to reduce and prevent errors and to continuously follow standards of quality and efficient patient care.

Creating A Safe Environment
Due to an increase in global healthcare, options and availability, tens of thousands of medical travelers leave their country to seek medical treatment in foreign destinations. In some cases, contributing factors to such the citizens involve affordability while for others it’s a matter of availability.

As many as six million Americans are estimated to seek medical attention in international destinations in coming years, and the number of international medical travelers from other countries such as South Africa, Europe, and Canada as well as travelers from countries like Iraq, Nigeria, Turkey and Croatia are seeking available and affordable medical care across their borders. 

Patients traveling across borders need to take the time to research and understand the capabilities and quality of foreign physicians, surgeons and medical facilities. Quality medical institutions are certified or accredited by domestic accrediting organizations or by international accreditation organizations such as the JCI, WHO, Trent Accreditation Scheme, the Australian ACHSI, or  Quality Health New Zealand, just to name a few.

The International Society for quality in Health Care (ISQua) as well as the USA and Canadian Council on Health Services accreditation also offer certification and accreditations in many global facilities.

What Should Patients Know?
In addition to knowing whether or not a facility or physician is certified or accredited, international medical travelers should also ask a variety of basic questions regarding patient safety and care in any destination.  The American Medical Association recently offered guidelines for medical tourists that include factors such as:

 

Selecting facilities that have been accredited by recognized international accrediting bodies
Follow-up care should be arranged prior to departure to ensure continuity of care
International patients should have access to physician licensure, accreditation of facilities, as well as data or information regarding outcomes of procedures or techniques performed by a specific surgeon or hospital
Transfer and sharing of patient medical records should coincide with HIPAA guidelines

 

Seeking international medical care is a personal decision that every individual must make on their own. However, any foreign facility should offer individual rights, management of information, quality leadership, infection control measures, and access to as well as continuity of care, regardless of procedure or destination.

Insurance Companies Have a Great Opportunity in Medical Travel

With healthcare costs in the United States continuing to rise at higher rates than inflation, American health insurers are facing very tough times as there’s enormous pressure on their financials. Some allow these cost increases to impact their earnings as a means to gain share, others pass this on to customers as higher premiums, and yet others prefer to keep prices but creatively nudge deductibles, co-payments, and contract terms as to be able to survive in a fiercely competitive and controversial market. However, they must slowly acknowledge that an escape valve is found abroad.

As technology and information flows are shrinking our world, travel for healthcare is becoming universal. Americans looking for excellent but affordable medical or dental procedures find that neighboring countries have shown to have private healthcare facilities which offer very high quality care at great value. Even if US insurance companies realize this is an irreversible trend and understand that letting some of their clients choose to go overseas for surgery may offer a great opportunities to alleviate some of the strain, they are being too slow to adopt it as part of their strategy. Pushing insured clients to seek less expensive options abroad is not only looked down upon but sometimes illegal. What they don’t realize is that they are benefiting from this already and what they need is to align incentives a little better.

The story of one of our recent patients illustrates this point. Mr. Chris Moss, a Denver citizen who asked to remain anonymous, was very recently diagnosed with prostate cancer and advised by his doctor to seek immediate treatment. Having had no health problems in the past, this was his first call to Aetna Global Benefits, his employer-provided insurer. To his surprise, while the robotic prostatectomy surgery he desperately needed would only be covered 80% if performed in the U.S, leaving him with tough-to-cover medical bills of over $10,000, he could choose to have his surgery abroad and his insurer would pay 100% of it. Chris immediately began to examine overseas options, skipping consciously on everything that wouldn’t meet or exceed the quality of care he could receive in Denver and quickly found an option which: 1) offered top-notch care, technology, and surgeons’ experience, 2) is very close to home, 3) has English-speaking staff, and 4) offers the possibility of remotely consulting with the doctors beforehand.

Without knowing it, Chris quickly became a Medical Traveler, one of the hundreds of thousands of Americans that seek affordable healthcare abroad. As patients typically do not know where to start their search or what they’ll find, medical travel facilitators provide assistance in understanding which are the best options, getting price quotes, contacting doctors, booking medical trips, and making the healthcare visit run smoothly. It was through our Monterrey-focused firm called Travel For Care that Chris learned about his options in Mexico and had a seamless experience from research to bookings, and from checking in at the hospital to arriving back home. Two weeks after beginning his research, Chris’ cancer was being removed using the most advanced method the world of medicine knows today.

In this case, Chris is extremely happy to have spent about $1,000 in travel and accommodations when he would have spent easily over $10,000 in co-payments back in Denver. Likewise, his insurance company spent about $28,000 when it could have paid 80% of a $50,000 surgery, or about $40,000. The case is clear, the best healthcare outside of the US, complying with the same quality standards, is as inexpensive as to make paying 100% of it cheaper than paying 80% of the US cost. Although it is true that this type of policy and its 100% coverage abroad terms are not the typical health plan, it should be an eye opener for the industry. Let’s make it clear, that nobody was shoved to go abroad for surgery. Nothing illegal or looked-down-upon was done. All parties are happy (including the Mexicans involved). It is a simple case study for free markets and incentives. Perhaps insurers should inform holders of such policies that they have valuable options abroad. Perhaps all insurers should think of adding the “100% coverage abroad” feature to all policies and see how the market’s invisible hand actually lowers costs and therefore premiums. All in all, there are great opportunities abroad for insurers employing creativity the right way. The best part is that all are set to benefit: insurers, customers, and society as a whole.