The healthcare industry often says it is five years behind when it comes to technology, but that estimate might be generous, according to Carrie Liken, head of healthcare at Yext, a digital knowledge management platform.
This content is sponsored by Yext.
Take an ill-fated ambulance ride for example. A patient with a cardiac emergency called 911, an ambulance picked the patient up at their home and the paramedics began to triage the patient, all according to plan. Meanwhile the ambulance driver searched for the nearest emergency room online and drove to the drop-off point. However, as the driver turned right into the parking lot of the ER, they found it was actually the parking lot of the local elementary school.
"It was a patient nightmare and a PR nightmare," Ms. Liken said at an executive roundtable at Becker's 8th Annual Meeting in Chicago. The worst part? The location confusion isn't even that uncommon when it comes to healthcare organizations, according to Ms. Liken.
Consumers are increasingly turning to the internet — and search engines like Google, specifically — to find the services they need. Searches for "retail near me" or "restaurant near me" have gone through the roof in recent years and healthcare is not exempt from this trend. The number of searches for "oncologist near me" increased 500 percent from 2015 to 2016, while searches for "urgent care near me" has increased 325 percent and "ER near me" has jumped 300 percent, according to Ms. Liken.
So how can providers ensure they come out on top when a patient searches for "healthcare services near me," and that those searches are directing patients to their hospitals, ERs and physician offices, and not the local elementary school?
The answer is in the secret sauce, according to Ms. Liken. Google and other major search engines rank results using a recipe of distance, relevance and prominence — but this recipe can be optimized.
Here are three tips from Ms. Liken — an eight-year veteran of Google — on how to sweeten the sauce, outsmart Google and optimize patient acquisition.
Tip No. 1: Consolidate provider and facility data internally. Health systems have a major problem in organizing their data. Most of this data is located in at least seven different places across the health system's ecosystem, and this presents a problem for health systems — if the information is disorganized internally, it will also likely be disorganized externally on search engines and other websites. Data consolidation is something Ms. Liken says she has observed almost no hospitals doing. Taking this information and ensuring it is accurate, and on top of that, adding it to a health system website, allows this data to be structured, organized and centralized, which is one signal a system can give Google to more easily pull accurate information to display in searches. Structured data is especially important as mobile and voice searches become more common.
On a desktop computer, a consumer might Google "dermatologist near me" and the search may return 10 pages of links to dermatology practices and ranked lists of the best dermatologists in the area. However, voice searches — those conducted with Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa, for example — only return one result, meaning healthcare providers have one shot to return the correct information. Mobile users are approaching the same singularity in their search results too, according to Ms. Liken.
This is because of a new tool Google rolled out about a year and a half ago called "knowledge cards." These cards often show up on the right hand side of a browser after conducting a Google search on a desktop computer. They include the name of the business, a brief description, location and contact information, hours, reviews, photos and links to the business's website. On mobile, these knowledge cards come up first, ahead of any links, and are often the only thing a consumer consults when looking for a business. And their information is often wrong due to a lack of structured data, according to Ms. Liken.
"Think about where Google is pulling from. If you are not giving [the data] to them, they will pull it from websites, tax records, updates people suggest on Google maps. All they want to do is fill those fields," she said. If the information is not up-to-date, chances are good patients will wind up in an elementary school parking lot.
"It's a very tough situation to be in and health systems are bearing the brunt of all of this," Ms. Liken said. "Unfortunately this is how the marketplace has evolved and it's nobody's fault how it all organically came together." The first step to fix the issue is to update and consolidate data internally.
Tip No. 2: Control your consolidated data by syndicating it to appropriate digital knowledge services providers. The second step is to make sure this structured data is getting to the right places online because most patients are not consulting health system websites when they look for information, according to Ms. Liken. Instead, they are consulting GPS maps like Apple Maps, Google Maps, Waze and others. They are looking to Facebook or healthcare publishers like Vitals. A study conducted by Yext determined businesses get 2.7 times more impressions outside of their websites than they do on their own websites when patients search for information on them.
Ms. Liken gave the example of a cancer center affiliated with a large academic medical center. If a patient had an appointment with the director of that cancer center and took information from Vitals, for example, it would provide that patient with the address to the physician's home. A second search of that address would reveal it is associated with a 5,396 square-foot home and not a physician's office, according to Zillow, but most patients are unlikely to conduct that second search. That means the patient is headed for the physician's home, which could be 45 minutes away from the physician's actual practice, resulting in a late and angry patient, Ms. Liken said.
"It is fascinating how inaccurate [health system data] is across the board," Ms. Liken said. Health systems must audit themselves and ensure they are in control of their data everywhere and are pushing out up-to-date, accurate information for all of their providers. "It's really important for the patient to not have that poor experience and for the provider brand to not be reflective of those inaccuracies," she said.
Tip No. 3: Devise a patient experience strategy that includes digital. As humorist Erma Bombeck once said, "Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died." Now Ms. Liken is challenging hospitals and physicians to think about their virtual "dead plants" — the trail of inaccurate and outdated information often left behind on the internet. These dead plants can be a bad omen for the type of customer service experience patients will receive. Today, health systems are only concerned with the patient experience as it relates to what happens once someone sets foot inside the health system. But the patient experience begins well before that.
Ms. Liken read from a patient review left online three months ago by a patient visiting a medical practice for the first time. The patient arrived 20 minutes early, but when they arrived, they found the office was no longer located where they found it on Google Maps. When the patient called the office, the staff said the patient had been informed of the new location when they made the appointment. "I was not," the patient wrote.
"This is a very powerful problem," Ms. Liken said. "I've even seen reviews where they say, 'I'm never going to this doctor again.' It's a really bad patient experience, and it's a digital experience."
As hospitals, health systems and physician groups strive to provide top-notch patient experience and compete for patients, they often overlook the digital experience, which can have a profound effect on how patients view their health system.
"Clean up the bad plants," Ms. Liken said. "Make them grow into really nice fertile plants."
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