Robert Sumner is a Technical Director and leads the Web Content Management (WCM) practice within the National ECM Business Unit at Perficient. As a director, he manages all WCM projects and provides internal strategic consulting, including business plan & sales strategy development for the Practice. He is an expert in the web content management space and has over 13 years experience leading ECM and WCM type initiatives, all with a delivery focus. From a technical perspective, he is well versed in ECM and Portal Technologies.
Q: What are some of the common issues faced by healthcare organizations today with regard to web content management?
A: This depends on the organizational unit that is approaching the problem. Two different organizational groups are often responsible for the challenges associated with web content management. The first group is the marketing group that is dealing with the challenge of connecting with patients and welcoming them into conversations with doctors and the organization as a whole. The second group, the IT group, is supporting marketing’s initiative to create a web presence by providing marketing with capabilities to manage their own content in a secure fashion. This can present some challenges. Giving full reign to the marketing team is not something that IT generally wants to do. These organizations need to decide the right mix of control and delineation over management of the site.
A second challenge comes when deciding how the content is best structured. The process needed to author, maintain, and present can be very complex, but it needs to appear to be seamless. Take, for example, a symptom tracker tool on a hospital website. Each disease state could require a multitude of images that the user navigates through to become more educated and aware of their symptoms and when it would be helpful to reach out to set an appointment. The marketers and editors, who are oftentimes not website pros, need the ability to create these tools and sites in a way that helps them broaden their reach and awareness. In order to make this a reality, a healthcare organization needs to have great structure around the creation of content.
The third challenge speaks to where the web content management market is really headed. How can we provide healthcare marketers with the analytics information necessary to drive and modify campaigns and achieve better success towards their marketing goals? Using a traditional system of data capture results in marketing making decisions based on what could be a hunch about the market. Based on what could be faulty information, they figure out what changes need to be made in web presence, provide that information to IT to reconfigure, then finally go live with the public facing content that is relevant to the patient. This could take weeks, or even months, to complete, and that hunch may not have been a good one. This often leads to bad investment decisions. Using real data and analytics, which are built into the content management system, will provide the marketer with actionable data about market conditions. If workflow issues have been properly remedied, then healthcare organizations can communicate with patients regarding timely public relations issues in an expedient fashion.
Q: You speak a lot about the importance of a refined workflow to meet demand for patient information. What tools do healthcare organizations have at their disposal to streamline this workflow?
A: New platforms allow a marketer to retrieve analytics data, as I mentioned earlier, and pull it back into the content management system quickly without having IT involved at all. Marketers need to be given the data and react to that data as quickly as possible with immediate feedback and the ability to make changes at will. From a workflow perspective, when I’m doing an assessment for a healthcare client, I look at operational efficiencies. Is the client taking advantage of some of the features that come with new platforms that allow you to get the data you need and generate processes using that data that could otherwise be difficult to follow? You can capture a current state, a future state, and then build a roadmap to cover that gap.
Q: What are the first steps a healthcare organization can take to create a content rich web presence for patients?
A: The first step involves segmentation and targeting. Marketing engines can be built directly into content management tools and marketers can build profile groups. For example, say that an organization wants to identify males over 40 or mothers of infants. All identified patients that meet those criteria are segmented, and the marketer can then create and assemble content that speaks to those specific segments. Creating this targeted content is the best first step, and a powerful content management system allows just that. The system allows a healthcare marketer to analyze data for each market segment and it offers changes to increase results. When a homepage is created, for example, there are areas of the page where a marketer can drag or drop content that would draw in a specific segment, which makes that homepage feel tailored and relevant to the user at hand. This is consumer-driven healthcare at its finest.
Q: Many discuss the importance of social media capabilities for healthcare organizations? Do you have any tips?
A: Many new web content management platforms have modules or components that execute on the run time website such that when you have a social interaction on your site (through blogging, forums, general tweets, etc.) that information can be added to a repository and analyzed by the marketing team. Take, for example, page level feedback via a “Share this on Facebook” button. Once a user clicks on that button, the components capture that information and write it back to the runtime repository, which is used at the page level to show the marketer how content is being shared socially. This creates a feedback loop directly into the content management system. You don’t want to wait to learn that you have had 40 people interact negatively with a piece of content. You want to know that on demand to shorten the response time.
Another question I’m often asked is “How do I know what people are saying about my organization off of my website?” Social integration technologies are a hot market. Many tools are available to “listen” for certain content. They Spider the web to find out anything they can about your hospital to respond and protect your brand.
Q: Many patients are using mobile devices to access healthcare information. How can a healthcare organization best respond to that?
A: This is a good question. Today’s WCMS platforms are extremely advanced. They allow for raw content to be collected as part of the content creation process and delivered to many different media vehicles, like a mobile device. These devices are responsible for presenting this content via presentation templates on the media platform of choice, e.g. mobile device use the same data, but may use less of it, or may present it differently on a tablet device because there is less real estate on a mobile. So in response, there are some cutting edge WCMS out there that are enabling authors to literally emulate the look and feel of content across any device by using inline mobile/tablet design views prior to publishing. This is a powerful feature.
Q: What are the leaders in healthcare enterprise content management up to these days? How can one create “the best website in the nation” available today?
A: This is a hard question to answer, but I would say the key component of a successful enterprise content management system is one that allows the marketing team to be enabled. These organizations take advantage of the newest web content management capabilities and are not afraid to introduce these new platforms into existing systems. This does not all need to be completed at once. These changes are best done gradually by introducing the new platform to test areas within the site. By conducting these pilot tests you can see how in a future release other areas of your site will be impacted. The most successful additions can then be rolled out across the entire site.
The best sites also allow and encourage the patient to interact with you at all times. With the advance of mobile application development and content delivery integration into these applications, the web becomes a secondary means of communication for most healthcare organizations. To respond, healthcare organizations need to collect information and interact with their community through doctor and patient participation. Are doctors participating and blogging on topics that are relevant to their areas of expertise? What content is practical to patients and do you offer updated content on those topics regularly? With the advent of consumer driven healthcare, the organizations that thrive are those that are good at breaking down barriers around siloed content (audio, video, print) and integrating them across their sites and mobile initiatives in a seamless fashion.
Do you have any other questions for Robert about enterprise content management and the healthcare websites of the future? Enter them below.
