The Official Omedix Blog

So, when we first started out, our mentality with clients was: When they call for update requests we’ll gladly make the requested changes, but it’d be silly to call up clients and create more work for ourselves.

Well, fast forward a few years and I realize that’s a pretty lame customer service mentality to have — basically doing only what’s necessary to prevent your customers from being unhappy.  Yikes!  So, we changed things up a bit, and in fact, in the last few weeks, we’ve begun living, doing, and promoting a new way of approaching our client relationships.

We figured most practices think they ought to be on the Web, they know they ought to make use of it somehow, but they really don’t want to sit down and learn HTML or learn all the detailed strategies for how one promotes, etc.  Maybe they’d like to know the high-level stuff and they’d like to see what’s possible, but then they’d kind of like to just have it done.  Over time, something tells me that while a physician is taking care of patients he’s not quietly thinking in the back of his head “oh my gosh, I need to update my website!” 

And so we started to realize that for a lot of our clients, either we contact them to recommend some site changes, or nothing happens.  We realized that they’re not being irresponsible; it’s just not #1 on their list.  We realized that, frankly, it should be our responsibility to keep these sites fresh and up to date.

The Evidence Stares us in the Face…

I give you Exhibit A:

This is my own father’s cardiology practice, as viewed on April 11, 2006, and their latest news is 9 months ago?  (By the way, if you’ve wondered why we always promote this site, read my personal explanation) In fact, they’re actually about to purchase one of the new CT/Angio machines.  Now, they’re doing it because this is a more powerful diagnostic technique, it’s less risky to the patient, and it allows them to be more proactive about treating heart disease, treating patients before they end up with a heart attack.

So, they may or may not have the idea to post this on their site.  But while this development is brewing on their end, we should be planning our periodic “is there anything we can update?” phonecall to them anyway.  When we call, they can tell us all about this, we can gather the necessary images for them, and, boom, they’re site has now been updated!

And It Gets Better, Too…

There’s something else going on here, too.  The CT/Angio is basically a tool for screening patients at risk for heart disease.  So, this is a way that they can grow their practice (bringing in new patients for screenings), it generates additional follow-up business for them in some cases (when a patient is found to have mild atherosclerosis and requires a proactive angioplasty), and all the while they’re doing a service to the world by making our community healthier. Everybody wins.

But how will people know they can do this unless they promote it?  And of course that’s where we come in. 

Patients visit the site — maybe from the search engines, maybe from a friend’s recommendation — they read about how they can get screened, they fill out the online appointment request form, and boom, we’re done.

There’s another thought, too — If their site looks out of date, people are unlikely to return.  If their site appears to be updated frequently, people will return to read what’s new.  I visit iHealthBeat every single day because, well, they update it every single day.

In the Process of Getting This Going

Doing all the proactive “what can we update for you?” sounds great, but, operationally, let’s be honest, it’s a challenge.  Suddenly we have created [# of clients] * [time it takes to contact each client] every [how often we contact our clients] months.  So we can’t just do it and celebrate, we have to really plan this out.

We’re in the process of doing that now, but I know it’s the right way to offer our service.  We’ve already started doing this with some of our clients, and we plan on doing it with every new client, so we’ve already begun promoting it this way.  I’m eager to hear your feedback on this, so let me know what you think of this!

Josh

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