The Official Omedix Blog

I spoke earlier today with a large multi-doc specialty group and the physician described their current website as “vestigial.”  Although I was aware of the meaning of the word, his comment takes on added humor and depth when juxtaposed to the dictionary definition:

ves·tig·i·al (v-stj-l, -stjl)
adj.

1. Pertaining to structures or organs that were well developed in an organism’s ancestors but have become rudimentary or degenerate during the course of evolution.

We all got a good laugh out of this one.  There are definitely benefits to serving the physician market.

I wish I could point to a news article or URL on this story, but this one is purely through the grapevine. 

Earlier today I spoke with a HIPAA Compliance Expert who recently received a phonecall from a chiropractor on the East Coast.  This chiropractor apparently offered online patient registration on his website — a feature which clearly represents Protected Health Information under HIPAA.  One of his patients noticed that the registration form on his website was not encrypted…

Apparently, the patient complained directly to CMS, and CMS has now asked the chiropractor to produce his HIPAA security plan (one of the elements required by HIPAA) within 30 days or else face fines of up to $100/violation capped at $250,000 and possibly jail time.  Yikes!

I’ve seen no shortage of practice websites that have these violations.  It will be interesting to see if news of this gets spread, and if so, how that affects people’s anxiety about HIPAA.

Wow, we just got back from the BONES conference (the largest annual gathering of orthopaedic practice managers), and talk about a success.  We met a ton of practice managers and learned what they’re looking for in their sites.  Now comes the hard part: following up with everyone in a reasonable time frame.

Conferences are funny because you’d think that Vendor A has as good of a chance as Vendor B to meet people that might be a good fit for their services.  You’d think.  In reality, we got pretty lucky by having a *great* booth location:

What exactly does “great booth location” mean?  Well, if you look at the illustration above (click to zoom), the purple arrows (drawn by us) represent the flow of traffic.  In the hopes of applying otherwise useless knowledge, I even made these arrows “vectors”, which is a fancy way of saying that the length of the arrow indicates how much traffic flowed in a particular direction.

As you can see, people naturally walk in and talk to the first vendors they see.  Then they branch out, but they get distracted along the way.  Maybe they see a friend, maybe they see food; who knows.  Either way, the “flow” of traffic decreases considerably with each row down that you go. 

Our booth was well-positioned because we were on the corner of the main thoroughfare, and also — and this counts as proof that luck matters as much as anything in business — the vendor across from us bought up four spaces, and had a wide-open area, meaning our bright purple-colored booth could be seen from the back of the hall.

Once we get our pictures together, we’ll upload a picture of the booth itself.

At any rate, this rather fortuitous flow of traffic meant we got to meet *lots* of people, and hear from them what they were looking to do with their sites.

There was nothing really surprising.  I’d say maybe 90% of practices have a site.  Among those 90%, I’d say 75% haven’t thought about their site in the last year.  Among the 25% that have thought about their site, I’d say 50% are unhappy with what they have.  Thus, our target market = 10% (the people who don’t have a site) + 90%*75% (The people who have a site but haven’t thought much about it) + 90%*25%*50% (the people who have a site and thought about it, but aren’t happy with their current vendor) = 89% of all practices.  WOW.

It’s not that our competitors are bad.  In fact, I would honorably say that our competitors produce decent-quality sites (not quite Omedix sites, but well, that’s another posting).  I think what’s really happening is that most practice managers just haven’t looked into their websites and how they use the Web in their practice.  Interesting stuff.

Anyways, so we’ll be busy following up with people and seeing what kind of new innovations are out there.  Of particular interest to me was the growing interest in patient education (finally!), and the nascent interest in practice intranets.  There are lots of cool solutions, there, so we’ll have to figure out the best way to set something up.

Thanks for reading!

 Josh

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

For a bunch of Internet-addicted web designers and programmers, it sure took us long enough to get our blog up and running.  But it’s finally here!

So what kinds of things do we plan on covering here?  Well, we’d basically like to answer the question “How can a physician practice make the best possible use of the Web?” 

There was a time when that question had a boring and uninteresting answer because there just wasn’t that much technology available.  But today things are different.  There’s online video, patient education, search engine marketing, great programming languages for developing cool personalized systems, and lots of other really exciting things.  Plus, integration with other healthcare IT systems (EMR, Practice Management System, PACS, etc) is starting to become a reality (the details on that one are for another blog posting).

For myself, personally (this is Josh writing), my father is a tech-savvy cardiologist, my sister is a pediatrician, my brother-in-law is an obstetrician/gynecologist, and I’m an entrepreneur and computer programmer so it’s pretty gratifying to see how my skills/interests apply to their lives!

There’s something else we wanted to do with this blog.  Companies today are different than they were 10 years ago.  Back in the day, companies were closed, mysterious entities whose true workings was the stuff of legend and myth.

Today, companies like that appear almost silly.  People now expect honesty and transparency.  The Web just makes it too easy to communicate so why fight the tide instead of embracing it? 

So perhaps most of all, this blog is us being who we are as we further hone our skills as Web Professionals for Medical Practices, and as we ourselves figure out how we can do a better job of what we’re doing.  I’ll probably be the author for most of these posts (no one else seems to like writing anything but code!), but we might have some guest contributors from time to time (I can think of some Omedix clients who might be game!)

Thanks for taking the time to learn about us, and we look forward to writing more!