Making The Office Visit a Value Exchange

Sunday night at 9pm EDT the #HCSM chat happens. It is one of the best online healthcare chats that I’ve participated in. It is fast, smart, well facilitated, and with some of the best and the brightest minds I have the pleasure of interacting with. The topics are well considered and examined in great detail. Each discussion drives me to think more and consider the changes occurring in healthcare. If you haven’t participated or lurked and you are interested in healthcare check it out, ” …as the dormouse said, ‘Feed your head’.”

I’m sure I am the most annoying participant with my continuous hocking about SM being a tactic and we need to identify strategies/goals and then overlay a tactic. Can’t help myself Donna and Alan beat me about the head for years to learn what a strategy is and how to use it. Sunday night #hcsm takes me back to sitting in the agency and having account people talk about tactics before they identify a strategy. Backing a tactic into a strategy is putting your shoes on and then your socks. 

Sunday morning along with the NY Times I get my mailing from Digital Tonto (www.digitaltonto.com). One of his posts was 4 New Marketing Paradigms: here
Within that post were nuggets that clarified my thinking about those HCSM chats. 

Greg the 4 new marketing paradigms:

From Making Contacts to Building Assets

 From Campaigns to Platforms

From Awareness to Activation

From Transactions to Experiences

Yes, his post is about consumer media and marketing but let’s get real. We have to think in terms of marketing, communications, and strategies if we are going to meet the needs of patients in this evolving digital world. 

It is the patient who is driving a need to know and learn because the www is allowing them in real time to seek solutions to problems they have, classic adult learning. To assume physicians who are struggling to keep up with an ever increasing work load and diminishing returns will jump into social media as a solution without first understanding what is happening is as likely as Mitt Romney is to have a cup of coffee.So we must look at strategies that engage both physician and patients and make that amazing unit of learning (patient & physician) work harder and produce better results. In a word use a strategy to show the physician what’s in it for them. 

In the section: From Making Contacts to Building Assets Greg states ‘What’s emerging is the concept of value exchange in the form of owned media assets.’ This is not about using apps and content (tactics) to capture ‘eyeballs’ (think patient office visits). It’s about building assets and creating engagement. 

The asset is the physicians knowledge and skill at delivering care. Creating engagement is helping patients replace or complement what they’ve learned at WebMD. Physicians should become MyMD to patients seeking knowledge. Make no mistake, patients trust their physician more then WebMD or they want to. Talk about a ready made gap to close, this is one that can be done.

Take away: The office visit is greater then the sum of its parts. It is a place to begin the ‘value exchange’. 

I will examine how Greg’s other models relate to health communications and social media over the next few days. And I will show an example of how to begin that value exchange. 

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