instantly health

“Houston, we had a problem here,” is the correct quote made by Apollo 13 astronaut John Swigert not the ever-popular misquote, “Houston, we have a problem.” Though, “Huston we have a problem,” from the 1974 made-for-television movie, “Houston, we have a problem,” flows much nicer. Fast forward to the SARS-CoV-2, 2020 pandemic, and it could easily be ‘Hospital, we have a problem.” I am not making light of the situation that hospitals and health systems find themselves in, but it points out the dilemma. And the difficulty is, how does the hospital lead the community in slowing the community spread of COVID-19? With the lack of national and sometimes local pandemic strategy, the hospital needs to lead the community in partnership with local businesses to “slow the spread.”  A complicated messaging task but not necessarily impossible. Businesses have already started with the no shirt, no shoes, no face mask, no service.  Image by Joshua Woroniecki from Pixabay The effort require...

Hint – it’s not treating the sick and dying, that is an existing role and expectation. Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay Hospital leadership can add the following to their already full plate trying to figure out how they will survive.  ·          Leading the community public health effort  ·          Being the credible source of truth  ·          Providing unbiased, scientifically accurate information for preventing the community spread of the disease  ·          Continuous, efficient, and effective patient and community engagement It’s not over until it’s over. As much as we all want the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic to be over so we can return to some semblance of past normalcy, the facts indicate it is not going to happen anytime soon.   As reported daily, Coronavirus continues to spread unabated, creating hot...

Well, in all honesty, the stupid was held back for eight weeks when the pandemic was early in the community spread of COVID-19 with the economic shutdown, shelter-in-place, and the wearing of facemasks messages. During the initial outbreak, hospitals did a remarkable job communicating with patients, community, government, employees, leading as a credible source of news and information regarding COVID-19. Image by Fernando Zhiminaicela from Pixabay These efforts faced significant headwinds due to officials in Washington and state capitals around the country gaslighting the public, contradicting health experts, and spreading false information. Unfortunately, this continues today with an added chorus of celebrity and “conspiracy news” websites declaring the pandemic a hoax and the wearing of facemasks futile. Phase I of the pandemic is not over. The grim reality is that the community spread of COVID-19 is resurging again, with new records for positive tests set daily. Hospital ICUs in C...

Hospitals and health systems, as a direct result of the pandemic, needed to engage patients, employees, and the community continuously. Messages were varied for each audience, but the current situation provided the opportunity as never before for the continuous engagement of the patient on a meaningful level. There is no reason why those engagement efforts should stop. What should be apparent in the new reality of healthcare, as an unintended consequence of the ongoing pandemic is that patient engagement is not a part-time or some of the time activity. What it should be viewed as is the opportunity to continue to create, engage, foster, and nourish an enduring relationship with those individuals and families. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay How healthcare is delivered changed exponentially, and now looks more like a distributive computer network, where the diagnosis and treatment were “distributed” out of the hospital or system. Patients had a taste of the new healthcare reality, f...

Is Your Website Optimized for Voice Search? Image Steve Bussinne from Pixabay How does this grab you? Thirty-eight percent of all internet searches are now by voice using a digital assistant like Siri, Alexa, Echo, and others on a smartphone or home voice internet-connected device. Additionally, most voice-activated searches are using the term "near me" sometimes combined with the term "near me today."  Putting it another way, with the pandemic, the potential patient may very well be voice searching for a physician, or hospital or COVID-19 information via voice search. Have you optimized your website for voice search so that you're included in the Siri or Alexa results? I ask the question about finding healthcare resources during a pandemic because it now moves beyond just getting directions using voice search to travel to the healthcare providers. Voice search is mostly a local phenomenon, and the hospitals in non-surge SARs-CoV-2 areas need to find creative ...

The purpose of the headline is to have hospitals think through more fully how they are engaging patients to return to the hospital. The driver was that I have been on several webinars recently and when the question of re-engagement was posed the standard answer was: Emails. Marketing. Phone calls. Okay, it is a start, but not enough. I was hopeful that due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, hospitals would have taken a more significant step forward in understanding the role of marketing and the patient engagement process. Now in fairness, there may be a more detailed strategy and tactical execution plan with measurable outcomes, but the presenters were unaware. It would appear that there continues to be a significant misunderstanding of the role of marketing and the use of the resource. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Let us take a step back because the patient is never going back to the old ways and responses. If marketing is not at the forefront of the hospital leading the re-engageme...

A significant change has taken place in hospitals and health systems as an unintended consequence of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.   Hospitals and health systems were forced on an unprecedented scale to rapidly engage with government, first responders, employees, patients, and the community. The engagement also required a new level of cooperation, communication, and information sharing between competing hospitals and health systems in any given location. Image by ar130405 form Piaxabay A new level of organizational transparency was required, as the communication flows and the information needed to be transmitted significantly varied depending on the audience and communication channel being used. In doing so, hospitals and health systems learned that meaningful engagement and transparency made a difference with patients and the community.   A hard-won first lesson as most engagement activities until the pandemic, we minimalistic and more along with the ones of marketing messages o...