Market your program on the Internet
Would you like to add 20 patients a month to your client base? Do you have barely an hour for background research on your patient outcomes for tomorrow’s staff meeting on data management?
The Internet can be one of your best marketing and research tools, as long as you know how to use it. Successful internet marketing is more than a "glorified yellow page ad," says Mark Perloe, MD, founder and owner of the Atlanta Reproductive Health Centre.
Rather than blatant here-we-are advertising, the best on-line marketing for a health provider is a presence that offers consumers meaningful information and interactive options. Once you establish your center as a service-oriented resource, visitors to your site will want to know how to reach you, so prominently post your street and e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and business hours. Don’t sit back and think your work is complete after you post a few informational articles or consumer checklists, however. Your visitors will expect a regular flow of new material, or they’ll stop coming.
Some of your visitors will use the interactive links and e-mail to shop the scope of your services and your staff’s experience. Perloe says that convenience draws busy consumers who don’t have time to spend on the telephone. "Twenty to thirty percent of our new patients visit our site before coming to the office," he estimates.
Established patients like on-line interaction as well. Of the 20 to 30 daily e-mails Perloe receives, many are from patients who would rather use their computers to communicate with health providers instead of playing phone tag.
"Their questions to me are more complete and precise," he says, "and they get more thorough answers from me than they might in a hurried phone call."
He explains to his e-mail correspondents, however, that they might have to wait a day or two for an answer.
If you’re mentally computing the hours per year invested in deal with e-mails and regular maintenance of a Web site like the Centre’s, the figure is in the thousands, Perloe says. Since it’s his baby and he handles it outside of office hours, the costs aren’t an actual budget item.
However, he estimates it would cost $50,000 to $60,000 to pay a specialist who would do what he does as an avocation. The average monthly on-line fees run $20 to $150.
The Centre’s fees run $200 a month because it has a registered, commercial account. Commercial accounts, Perloe says, are those from which a facility can potentially make profits. Currently, only one company, Network Solutions in Herndon, VA, provides Web site registration services.
The setup costs for a Web site can be virtually unlimited, so again, the watchword is choices. Consultant Joyce Flory, PhD, founder of the Chicago-based Communications for Business and Health, conducts workshops and offers corporate training on designing Web sites.
Flory says you can find small vendors to do basic attractive sites for $1,500 to $60,000. On commercial grade sites, rich with graphics and interactive features, you can spend millions.
Can the returns offset the costs of a basic site? Perloe believes so. Since he launched a Web site two years ago, it’s had 200,000 visits. The Centre’s practice now includes patients from New York, Indiana, Guam, and Europe. Some have come to Atlanta for fertility treatment, and others have engaged his fertility consultation services via e-mail.
Whether you use the Internet as a marketing or research tool, it’s a time eater. If you’ve ever spent an interesting but fruitless on-line hour searching for a simple tidbit, such as the names of women’s centers to refer a patient who’s moving out of state, you know the importance of cyber-research skills.
Flory, co-author of the book, The Online Business Atlas (Irwin Professional Publishing, Chicago), offers these tips for assembling the Internet research tools you need and thereby netting better returns for your research time:
• Enlist your staff’s input in identifying your facility’s research needs. You might come up with categories such as national women's’ health legislation, clinical developments in women’s health, and managed care.
• Hire a student or assign an administrative intern to do the legwork of screening Web sites that contain the data categories and testing search engines that will end up in your bag of research tools. For example, you might want a directory of women’s health products vendors, a parenting information site for your patients to visit, and a general source of current medical literature. Your staff can review the narrowed possibilities in far less time than it would take to screen from scratch.
• Find the search engine, such as Yahoo, Excite, or Magellan, that serves you best. Flory reminds users that each engine performs certain tasks better than its counterparts.
• Include a comprehensive women’s health care home page or Web site on your list of research tools. The best ones can provide swifter links to volumes of information than the search engines. (See list, inserted in this issue.)
Sit back and let the answers come to you by posting queries on the women’s health care mailing lists and news groups. Looking for a specific type of site? Post a notice, and other users will offer suggestions.
• Update your research list regularly, because sites change, and new ones appear every day. ß
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