The Path for a Successful Patient and Consumer Engagement for Health and Wellness Companies

6 part blog by Amir Kishon, Ph.D., Chairman & CEO  

Healthcare is different and Facebook, successful as it is in connecting us all, shows abysmal results when it comes to engaging patients. Why is this the case?  

 

If you build it, they will not come. 

 

By now we all know of Web 2.0. Most companies understand that their sites need to offer much more than just nice content ("Glorious brochure-wares"). Web 2.0 guides us towards interactivity as king and recommends sites that offer powerful online tools, a social support environment and personalized content. However, it turns out that building a Tools x Info x Community site usually yields for healthcare companies single digit engagement (< 5% of their total population). This renders the whole exercise of building an online  patient destination as just a nice benign little marketing play. The results are so miniscule that nobody usually even cares to measure them. 

Somehow, teams that are in charge of building online destinations for healthcare companies are excused for just delivering less than 1% engagement, a position that is quite rare when you get to companies that focus on real consumer engagement. A team at Apple or Google that delivers < 1% engagement usually is immediately sent back to the drawing board or relieved of its duties. 

  

What is Engagement?

So what is real patient engagement? 

 

We offer the following definition for online and mobile:

 En-gage-ment:

1. Capturing your network, customers and target audience
2. Converting your members into "frequent flyers" and contributing individuals
3. Sustaining members overtime
4. Changing the behavior of your users towards specific goals

All these should capture meaningful chunks of the total population. Towards the end of this blog we will share what we believe are target numbers to aim for with regards to each one of these goals. 

Getting Serious

So, we want to get serious and actually engage patients... What to do? Wellness Layers and its management, for the last 15 years, have built several of the largest health and wellness destinations (Nutrisystem, CBS/Medscape consumer portal, Lifetime Fitness, Medifast, and MSWatch.com to name a few). We continuously discover that in order to achieve meaningful engagement you need 3 key layers: 

• A social support layer ("We" Layer)
• A personal apps and plan layer ("Me" Layer)
• A personalized content layer ("Info" Layer)

But as the preceding paragraph claims, this is not enough. Beyond the necessity of having these 3 layers, a good architecture needs to make sure that each one of these layers is done RIGHT as well as each layer should cross-feed the other layers. To sum this up:

The Threefold Path to Engagement

• #1 Right Social Media
• #2 Right Personal Apps
• #3 Right Content    

In this blog we will discuss exactly what "right" means for each part of this important triad. 

We will start with Right Social Media.

  

What Lady Gaga is doing between 2am to 3am

We are great fans of Facebook. It is brilliant and powerful. Nevertheless, when you measure how health and wellness companies are doing on Facebook compared to other markets, you may immediately be compelled to scream "Houston, we have a problem!"

Let's compare two of the biggest names in entertainment and healthcare, Lady Gaga and Mayo clinic:

OK, so we all know that Lady Gaga is huge, but how come one of the leading healthcare institutions in the country only has 43,417 fans? We all know that there are tens of millions of patients with significant chronic conditions like diabetes, cancer, cardiac, weight loss problems, etc. These patients are living with their conditions day and night and are highly engaged facing their conditions.

Why are these patients not there? Why is it that one of the leading health institutions in the country, a consumer brand, yields the same number of fans that Lady Gaga captures in 1 hour during off peak hours? This does not compute.

Facebook?

Here is a little exercise. Go to your Facebook page and read what your friends are talking about there. We will wait until you come back.

 

You are back. Great! How many of these posts were about serious health problems? I have done my little survey, and here are my results:

 

My page statistics: 

• Family and friends news - 17 posts
• Links to content - 16 posts
• Business - 5 posts
• Trips - 4 posts
• Entertainment - 4 posts
• Thoughts and misc - 3 posts
• Health challenges - 0 posts!

Being a bit of a generalist here, most conversations on Facebook are light-hearted and meant mostly to celebrate personal life. We hardly find a post that shares anything that is remotely related to the experiences of deep health or emotional challenges. 

 

This is actually quite understandable, who in his or her right mind wants to share deep emotional and physical challenges with college friends and the rest of the world on Facebook? 

 

We love the work of Mark Zuckerberg, but the results of healthcare companies on Facebook present a clear case against Facebook as the main destination for such support. Later we will discuss how actually one can use Facebook and other social media destinations to support the right approach.

 

Right Social Media

 

We all know that patients actually want to talk and share experiences and garner support. Chronic conditions are taxing and uncertain to manage and patients do yearn to share emotions, tips, information, stories, etc. So how can we tap into the power of social media and do it RIGHT?

 

Part 2 - Threefold Path to Engagement - Right Social Media

Wellness Layers announced today the launch of five new Wellness Layers Platform Editions to drive specific and targeted customer and patient engagement solutions for mid to large-sized health and wellness brands and organizations. The Wellness Layers Platform has been especially honed for the needs of health and wellness companies over the last decade. The further specificity for each Edition caters to clients' needs as well as consumer and patient expectations within specific health and wellness markets.  

 

The five new Editions will benefit the following markets: 

• Healthcare
• Nutrition & Diet
• Fitness
• Social Ecommerce
• Pharma 

 

Each Edition has a strategic architectural approach and a fine-tuned set of modules to provide a distinctive experience for each market. Four of the five new Editions will be launched this summer with clients, including the Fitness, Healthcare, Social Ecommerce, and Nutrition & Diet Editions. 

 

"The logic deeply embedded within the Wellness Layers Platform is that specificity is absolutely necessary to maintain relevance and value for users," remarks Amir Kishon, Ph.D. and CEO of Wellness Layers. "These new Editions help us take this further and offer deeper particular solutions for each one of our core markets and are part of an evolutionary process for adding meaningful value to online health and wellness patient solutions as we see in other markets beyond healthcare."

 

Each Edition is built upon the Wellness Layers Foundation Platform which offers the innovative triad of the Wellness Layers Me-We-Info approach: 

• Online personal plans, applications and e-coaching ("Me" Layer)
• Brand-centric community ("We" Layer)
• Dynamic personalized content ("Info" Layer) 

 

Each Edition then adds specific applications to extend the three Me-We-Info layers towards the particular needs within each market.

 

The Healthcare Edition is designed especially for hospitals and other providers of care. Today many provider websites are mostly "brochure" style, information laden sites. This Edition introduces a new patient-centric architecture that is personalized based on the patient interests and needs. The Edition focuses on empowering patients to achieve their health goals, gain access to online transactions (e.g., scheduling, prescription refills, PHR, personal wellness management), connect with their care team and other patients, as well as easily locate information that is pertinent to their care. The Edition also deploys "mini-site" architecture, enabling each care area or department to nurture their specific facility or department mini-site including their own "Me-We-Info" layers. These capabilities can be complimented with mobile connectivity allowing ubiquitous access.

The Healthcare Edition can connect with PHRs, EMRs, HIEs, etc., meeting meaningful use requirements as well as being compliant with HIPAA and other provider guidelines. 

The Nutrition & Diet Edition serves nutrition, diet, and wellness companies to provide their customers with 24/7 nutrition and dieting support. The Edition offers a state-of-the-art diet and wellness support environment which includes personal nutrition and fitness management, a social wellness community and personalized information. This new Edition integrates feeds-based architecture which combines the personal activity and achievement feeds with the community feed, creating an ongoing personal narrative and dialogue all about eating right, weight management and wellness. Preset diet programs, coaching, ecommerce integration are all available. The Platform is ideal for companies and brands looking to increase acquisition, retention and support of their clients.

 

The Fitness Edition is specifically honed for health clubs and fitness centers to offer high social engagement and greater personal fitness goals management for their members. The new architecture is designed to keep members on track with their fitness goals by integrating interconnected applications like personalized fitness and nutrition planners, dynamic plan suggestions from trainers, game dynamics, and actionable club specific information all in one place. This Edition also offers clubs and fitness centers a complete social engagement solution using a social network that has been specifically designed for clubs to achieve stronger retention, acquisition and conversion among existing and prospective members as well as grow personal training and other club services.

 

The Social Ecommerce Edition adds social to online and mobile health and wellness product shopping. Consumers can engage with other shoppers to rate, save, share and comment on products as well as share stories and experiences while using the brand's products and services. The primary goal of this Edition is to leverage the social layer to create an ongoing cycle of organic sales growth and increased customer satisfaction. Healthy living applications such as personal health and wellness planners with goal setting and tracking can be integrated with this Edition to create further client retention and guidance. This Edition is designed to help health and wellness product companies achieve a higher level of engagement and revenue growth.

The Pharma Edition is the first pharma and medical device platform that enables pharma to securely tap into the full power of health 2.0 without the existing regulatory challenges. The Platform offers personal health management apps and social engagement for patients yet fully satisfies adverse event reporting concerns or any other regulatory and privacy issues using a patent-pending architecture. The Edition features personal condition, medication, device, and prescription management applications alongside with a private-label patient community that can be customized around the brand experience. The solution is designed to enhance patient acquisition, retention, conversion, adherence and support. 

 

For additional information, visit http://www.wellness-layers.com/solutions/platform-editions