field notes

If I asked you how a hospital develops trustful relationships with patients, you might tell me it’s through patients’ interactions with doctors. Or their experience with the nursing staff. You might be surprised to hear me also say: your website.

We’ve established that fear is the wrong emotion in healthcare marketing. But with 31 other emotions to choose from, how do we know which is the right one to target?

Imagine going home from the hospital just 3 days early after having major, open-heart surgery. That's becoming a reality, aided by new digital health apps that are connecting doctors and patients like never before and redefining what it means to deliver a superior Patient Experience.

Virtual Reality is becoming an attainable reality

It used to be that VR headsets were clunky, less-than attractive devices for geeks. But now that Oculus Rift has announced a consumer version and other brands like Valve are jumping on the bandwagon, we’re getting much closer to VR replacing the PlayStations in our living rooms (and maybe even our TVs).

Expect long lines at Apple Stores today for the long-awaited Apple Watch. This year alone UBS expects Apple to sell 25 million of them, with annual shipments reaching 68 million by 2018. Apple has a tendency to swoop in and dominate markets, as it did with smartphones, tablets, and personal audio, so it's not a big stretch to expect the company to accomplish the same thing with wearables. If so, it could open up a major new digital marketing channel uniquely suited to wearable tech.

In the early March demo event, Apple VP of technology Kevin Lynch used his Apple Watch to take a call, watch a video, and open a garage door among other things. And like other smartwatches, it can do things like track your heart rate and tell you when you've been sitting around for too long. An accelerometer measures total body movement, calories burned, and number of steps per day, and there's potential for countless health related applications, which is great news for healthcare digital marketers. Here are 3 reasons why the Apple Watch will be the new marketing frontier in healthcare.

"The Pepsi Challenge is back, with a twist" reports the New York Times. But I think it's more of a much-needed update than a "twist."

The 1975 Pepsi Challenge is perhaps the most iconic representation of what marketing used to be.

At shopping malls across america, the company ran blind taste tests against Coke. Pepsi won, of course, and used it as marketing leverage for the next decade. Despite results, Coke continued to dominate the market. But how could that be? Pepsi had scientifically proven it was a better product.

This edition of Rhino Radio is a recap of the 2014 Greystone Healthcare Internet Conference presentation on "What's next in healthcare digital marketing?" 

A recent PwC study quote recently got me thinking: “As ‘patients’ behave more like ‘consumers,’ health care organizations need to deliver a higher level of personalized service, satisfaction and overall experience – or risk losing business to the competition.”

If you’re a hospital digital marketer, you need to be creating online treatment programs. Here are 5 reasons why.

Car websites have cars. Zappos has shoes and product videos. Apple has shiny gadgets beautifully photographed. Amazon has photos of products, the ability to look inside the pages of books and user feedback. Lots and lots of user feedback.