Melody Smith Jones

Speaking to patients about money is often viewed as distasteful in the healthcare setting. However, as both national and state healthcare legislation evolve, and the cost of care soars under the weight of aging boomers and patients with multiple chronic conditions, the patient’s dual role as a consumer of healthcare services will become clearer. As […]

The world of Connected Health is in constant motion. It is good fun for me to watch the data churn that then helps us predict the Connected Health trends across the next 10 years. If you are curious about what that brave new world looks like, then you can see in “Creepy or Cool? A […]

Last Friday I completed my stint on an enterprise portal (intranet) project for a provider with nearly 60,000 employees. Having a national presence, the organization I worked with has complex internal collaboration needs. While the implementation of such a technology is complex, the content strategy needed considerable attention. It also just so happens that yesterday […]

During the Connected Health Symposium last week, I noticed a significant trend that I have since been calling the “next big thing for the quantified self movement”. What is the next big thing in a world dominated by fitness trackers and mobile apps? That next big thing is biofeedback. I gained access to quite a […]

Last week, I was at the Connected Health Symposium in Boston. It is with great pleasure that I relay what I was taught during my favorite session by Nir Eyal author of “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products”. We know that mobile devices change our day-to-day behavior, but why are mobile devices so good at […]

I’m having a good laugh at all of the memes floating through social on the “hugeness” that is the new iPhone 6. Apple even wisely predicted the size sentiment (\0x2105 super user research) and landed a spot featuring Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake that provides a few laughs. So, while size-by-size comparisons are even a […]

In a recent chat with the VP of a large health system, I learned what keeps him up at night. His organization, like many across the nation, has invested mountains of time and money in Meaningful Use Stage 2. Like most health systems (all but 11% says research groups like KLAS) they chose to invest […]

In our next installation from the “What the market says you need in your patient portal” series we bring you avatars. These avatars are closely related to our last post on gamification and serious games, but their real value proposition is in what I like to call “high touch digital healthcare.” Many may think that […]

More than half way through our “What the market says you need in your patient portal” series I bring to you one of my favorite topics: healthcare gamification and serious games. Games are great at explaining complex systems. There are fewer places one can find complex systems than in the micro and macro worlds of […]

Next in our lineup of “What the market says you need in your patient portal” series is social collaboration. This topic brings us to the core of a term that we hear a lot in the industry: patient engagement. What is that, really? Any form of engagement requires communication. Right now communication between provider and […]

Taking our “What the market says you need in your patient portal” series a step further, today we are going to address the market demand for dynamic scheduling. When it comes to the marketing work of drawing patients into the brick and mortar, I often tell clients that, where their website and patient portal are […]

Last month I published a post entitled “What the market says you need in your patient portal” that garnered a lot of interest. In that post I addressed the balancing act that healthcare executives face when market based initiatives are sidelined in order to drive focus to regulatory requirements such as Meaningful Use. Sometimes the […]