Telehealth Secrets 2019: Finding Patients: The Power of Search Marketing - Charlie Sardou, Change Healthcare

Editor's Notes

• #2: Presented by Charles Sardou. Past of Change Healthcare, Kasier Permanente, United Health, Red Cross iCrossing, & Disney - Now of MGM Grand Resorts. Feel free to contact me at [email protected] if you have any questions or need some help.
• #3: As you have heard repeatedly during the TH-S conference. Tele-health offers a plethora of tangible advantages for Dr’s, Patients, & Providers. The biggest one being Patient Convenience or as I prefer to say “Time to Care”
• #4: Despite all the advantages – Adoption has been painfully slow. Although slightly faster than EHR Adoption …Yeah!
• #5: Most of the adoption failure is the lack the Patient options and the reluctance to treat in home. Patients are used to face to face visits. Even getting Patients to use Urgent Care rather than the ER is a struggle. (It was one of KP’s #1 priorities while I was there) HIPPA makes it harder to communicate and retain patients. Most providers don’t offer good digital customer service or experience…..and are not efficient in doing so. They way around this is to get patient opt-in from the beginning & build trust over time.
• #6: In-Patient Telehealth gives greater access to specialists – But is mostly the same inconvenient patient experience. Not surprisingly the bulk of Telehealth adoption is still within a clinical setting. It benefits the provider by improving scheduling efficiencies…and costly infrastructure! The procedure shown above could have been performed anywhere on the patient’s phone at a fraction of the cost. Let’s be clear….above isn’t Telehealth – It’s a Video Conferencing!
• #7: We are still very much stuck in the first wave aren’t we? Source – Chilmark Research (2016) Health Care Innovation will not occur without: 1) Universal EHR portability - Data liquidity between systems. 2) Standardized Medical Schema - FIHR Standard (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) for exchanging healthcare information electronically HL7.org 3) Pay for what you get Procedure Pricing / Price Transparency 4) Data Security / Privacy Trust 5) Patient willingness to change behavior. Microsoft has done a nice job of creating compliant automated data workflows within Azure that leverage the FHIR standard. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2019/02/07/microsoft-for-healthcare-technology-and-collaboration-for-better-experiences-insights-and-care/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-api-for-fhir/
• #8: Hospital likes St Jude’s in Fullerton - Not only do hospitals have physical presence they have other connections like provider coverage, retirement homes and local clinics to lock patients in. Telehealth needs to over come this disadvantage by being digitally savvy.
• #9: Search is more than just Google Ads and Rankings. It effects how people choose Doctors online and off. It effects your ratings your traffic your site navigation your adoption rate. Search is very much the core of the patient’s experience. Clarity and Intent are the heart of Search Marketing.
• #10: Google more an more is looking or Patient Experience and social signals like reviews to determine Search rankings. (SERPS). Inbound links have recently been scrutinized to deter black hat back-linking practices. Here’s a brutal summary of Google’s August Medic update. Adversely Effecting the rankings of 41% of all health sites. Apparently - Google doesn’t like snake oil salesmen.
• #11: Take a moment and ask these questions above of your website or app Experience your site as your patient would. .
• #12: More & more Google is looking to accurately answer the Patient’s questions “Telehealth” and “tele-medicine” are ambiguous terms which leads customer and search engine confusion. They both have unclear buyer intent. The popularity of the “What is telehealth” search query is a good indicator of this! Are we talking platforms or services here? Platforms currently crowd out services for search visibility. Back in the day we would just stuff keywords on a site. Google has become more nuanced and is now looking at supporting keywords (LSI) to gain greater insights. One of the easiest way to do Keyword research is to simply start typing in the Search bar and see what Google recommends. Googles Sem keyword planner can tell you the relative value of each keyword. (Cost Per Click) Phrases the have higher relative buyer intent convert better and thus more expensive.
• #13: Google Trends indicates interest in Telehealth is relatively flat over the past 2 years. Telehealth and Telemedicine are broad topic areas and often refer to platforms further confusing the consumers. Telemedicine is more popular than 22,000 vs.18,000 searches a month. Patients are for some variation of “Online Doctor” at 22,000 searches a month.
• #14: We can see that interest in Online Doctors varies by region. Google itself offers a lot of useful research and tips. I am a big fan Think With Google for consumer research and marketing related topics. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/ The Google Developers Area https://developers.googleblog.com and Search Console (Formerly known as Webmaster Tools) https://search.google.com/search-console/about?hl=en&utm_source=wmx&utm_medium=wmx-welcome are great places to visit for more technical topics.
• #15: Online Tools like SEM Rush or Moz allow you to monitor your competition’s advertising, messaging and sources of traffic for less than $200 a month. Both offer 1week free trails if you want to quickly evaluate yours versus your competitors site performance. Here we can see Amwell stepping up their online advertising efforts this year- mostly around its United Healthcare partnership. We can also easily track Amwell’s sources of inbound web traffic including search, content social and display effort . We can monitor the effectiveness of offline advertising like TV advertising by tracking brand or campaign search activity. I recommend setting up a Google News search for Telehealth topics and competitors and you get a custom summary emailed to you once daily or weekly.
• #16: Various online tools & Google Page Speed Insights https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ can quickly indicate where improvements can be made. Site & page improvements impact the outcome of all of your digital marketing efforts. So always be optimizing site performance & customer satisfaction.
• #17: On page SEO – Using Reach Snippets and Structured data make it easy for Search engines to expose relevant data and capture patient attention. Here are Google’s recommendations for “markups” https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/mark-up-content
• #18: Start by optimizing your XML site map and categorizations. You can automate some of this process using plugins like Yoast. But you have you plan for what you want to be found for. It becomes easier if you start with a solid site structure. I recommend you adopt Schema.orgs Medical types for your structured data needs. https://schema.org/docs/meddocs.html
• #19: Over 2/3rd of natural searches are performed on mobile devices. Google looks at mobile performance first. .M sites don’t cut it anymore your site needs to be fully responsive and load fast. Amwell ‘s desktop version gets a good grade...its mobile site fails because it loads slowly. Normally image size is the culprit.
• #20: Google Ranks Mobile First. Enough said. M dot sites are no longer acceptable. Your site must be fully responsive and easy to use on a phone. …or suffer the consequences!
• #21: It is extremely important for Dr’s to maintain and enhance their listing & ratings! Here’s a good example why. You need to pay attention to your Google Business even if you don’t have a physical location. Monica has managed to squat on Amwell’s business listing giving her free visibility at Amwell’s expense. Gotta Love Monica’s moxie! …But this makes we wonder if anyone from Amwell has searched for their site. Few employees do. At some point Google is going to mandate actual addresses. This was from yesterday… https://www.searchenginejournal.com/john-mueller-seo-address/328941/ Creating the impression of a physical presence online is important as it reassures the patient who is used to a hospital environment So set up an impressive virtual environments patients want to visit.
• #22: Create content with yours patients needs in mind. Reddit and my favorite – Buzz Sumo! are great places to discover trending topic ideas. https://buzzsumo.com/content-research/ Buzz Sumo just released a study on content trend that’s worth reviewing. https://buzzsumo.com/blog/content-trends-2018/ I am looking forward to seeing the JD Power Telehealth study next month! https://www.jdpower.com/business/resource/us-telehealth-study Increasingly there is a flight to quality in content which is why sites like the NY Times and Wikipedia are dominating both regular search news searches and image searches. Gone are the days optimizing for a 150-200 word pages. Today - “Authoritative” content is often 1200 words or more. Make the effort to create useful relevant content that your patients can use.
• #23: If there’s repeated theme here – All of the user experiences with your marketing are tightly connected. Search informs social. Social signals boost search. The more your content is seen & shared - the better! Patient feedback on Facebook, Twitter or Yelp influence Google results. A few years a go it would only take 62 shares to garner a top 10 rank. Today it might be five times that amount. Make sure you encourage sharing & positive reviews!
• #24: In addition to ADA requirements voice is going to be imperative moving forward.– making it easy for patients to search. - Here is where those Rich Snippets come on handy.
• #25: Unfortunately, humans do not read much anymore. Video is an underutilized communication medium that’s ideally suited for explain the benefits and process of Telehealth. You Tube continues to grow at an incredible rate and is a relative bargain from an advertising perspective. Today great video content is not that not difficult or expensive to produce. Embed your video, animation, or Infographic in a relevant authoritative location. Make sure to clearly link back to the most relevant or useful page on your site…or a conversion page.
• #26: Too many health sites are still not secure or do not have up to date SSL certificates. Data security is a patient privacy issue. Any PIH information communications must be secure and encrypted. Here’s an area where emerging Blockchain solutions could be useful. Great idea to get ahead of the California privacy standards (CCPA) https://uploads.ssl.webflow.com/5aa18a452485b60001c301de/5d8bc3342a72fc8145920a32_CPREA_2020_092519_Annotated_.pdf by adopting Europe’s GDPR standards now. https://gdpr-info.eu/
• #27: Always sad to “lose the patient”. Especially after you’ve spent all the time and money getting them to your website. Conversion optimization is vital both from a search and a ROI perspective. Find and fix out where patients are abandoning your process. The Conversion XL site is a great place to learn about the fine art of CO. https://conversionxl.com/blog/
• #28: As a retailer I was taught to always “spend money close to the cash register”. Just cutting down on site and cart abandonment has a huge payoff for any online business Always be measuring A/B testing your site for improvement. Free Google analytics is enough for 99% of companies to make significant improvement in their search results and patient satisfaction. Tools like Optimizely are inexpensive. https://www.optimizely.com/platform/experimentation/ but there are even cheaper ways to run A/B tests! One of the best reasons to set up a paid search campaign is to test messaging and landing pages with real potential customers quickly and easily. Google will even give you $100 if you spend $50. That’s enough to run a decent test. https://ads.google.com/intl/en_us/lp/coupons/ .
• #29: The best way to improve your visibility, traffic and sales is to offer better patient service and maximize digital word of mouth. Experience your Telehealth service as a patient would and make the process and experience better. That’s easier said than done!
• #30: Search is more than a marketing medium. It’s the glue of patient experience. Learning how to leverage it is going to crucial for Telehealth’s adoption. There is no secret sauce. Your website & Apps should offer Relevance, Usefulness, Authority, & Trust. Patients Will Find You! …& Refer You. That’s when marketing investments are both efficient & effective. It’s a crowded market place the platforms and services Google & Apple will are already in the diagnosis business. They already have health data and credit card information & purchasing data. How are you going to compete? Who will win-will be the one who delivers the best patient experience. Make yours great.
• #31: Please Keep in Touch … Link-In! Let me know if you have any questions or need any help.