Global Health, Fitness and Medical Issues

Caring for a child with a learning disability can feel tough.

Conditions like autism or ADHD, in particular, can make even the simplest of daily tasks a challenge.

Now though, Canadian software developer Pierre Séguin has created an app to help make life for kids – and their families – less stressful and more fun.

Big data analytics can play a crucial role in helping patients get healthcare at a lower cost.

Today, healthcare costs are much higher than they should be and have been growing steadily over the past 20 years. In fact, according to a study by McKinsey, healthcare expenses represent nearly 17.6% of United States’ GDP. Due to the rising cost of healthcare, it’s time to look at smart, data-driven ideas.

From autonomous cars to Internet of Things, big data has percolated almost every industry. It’s no surprise that the healthcare industry, with its large amount of data, is on the verge of big data-driven transformation, perhaps more than any other field.

Healthcare analytics has the potential to reduce treatment costs, predict outbreak of epidemics as well as preventable diseases and improve the quality of life. Here are 5 examples of how big data analytics in healthcare can help save lives.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=Big+Data...

It is easy for online website owners to get lost in the world of data and analytics. Healthcare marketers too, track their online performance because it helps them appraise whether their efforts are reaping the predicted results or not. With such tough competition, which metrics to track and which ones not to and which ones to focus on and which ones to leave can become extremely stressful. But everyone has been there even us! Once you know of these 5 metrics and begin monitoring them, we can guarantee you will see improvements in your online rank which will, of course, have a positive impact on your reputation and conversions. 1. Conversion Rate Conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors who completed any desired action the website page demanded. For instance, if they were on the appointments page, they booked an appointment, if they were on the patient information page, they filled in their details etc. The higher conversion rate means your website and healthcare practice is doing well. Source 2. Bounce Rate Source Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave the site after viewing only a single page they initially landed upon. Like any other website your healthcare website’s focus should be on keeping the bounce rate low. Why? It is because every potential visitor who left without converting or booking an appointment is a lost customer. 3. Top Pages Another important metric to track is identifying which pages receive the most traffic. This knowledge will help market gather real-world data that helps in determining what the audience really connects with. Is it the blog’s page or patient stories section? Whichever it is, once you have the knowledge, try optimizing it. Evaluate what’s working and create more of it to increase engagement and boost conversions. Source 4. Exit Pages Unlike a bounce rate, an exit page metric determines that the user has left the site after viewing not just one, but multiple pages. Having a higher exit page ratio indicates that there lies some problem with the final call to action page. If the visitor is leaving without converting, either the process is too complicated (expanded into two three pages) or requires too much personal information. To reduce the exit page ratio, marketers need to dig deeper and do everything in their power to prevent a higher exit page ratio at best. 5. Time Spent How much time do visitors spend on your website is also very telling. Did you know that on an average, 55% of visitors spend 15 seconds on your website? Too short, no? This is a very short span of time to gain their attention. Visitors staying longer than that means they have found something they came looking for. That increases your chances of converting them into customers. Keeping them engaged means you offer them something they can’t resist. Is your healthcare website doing that? How can you do that? Source To begin, offer them resourceful and engaging content (blogs, articles, case studies). Next, present it in a way that catches their attention (eye-catching web layout) and finally, make it available via multiple platforms (responsive web design) 

Read more: The 5 Metrics You Should be Tracking to Ensure Your Healthcare Website’s Success | Refresh Healthcare Blog | https://www.refreshhealthcare.biz/blog/healthcare-marketing/the-5-metrics-you-should-be-tracking-to-ensure-your-healthcare-website-s-success

The World of Technical Reality brings new possibilities and opportunities, especially for Healthcare industry. Here the brief explanation of Mixed reality Technology in clinical care and Medical Education.

In today’s connected world, search engine optimization, or SEO, has taken on an elevated importance. That’s not just because your practice can see more conversions through your online channel than, say, through the Yellow Pages, but it’s also because your competitors are competing for that same online real estate known as the top search results. What’s more, prospective patients have more choice than ever before when it comes to learning about you, your services, and your practice. Much of that content is outside of your control. Not convinced? Check out Google Reviews to see what patients are saying about other doctors in your area. How many of these doctors have their website show up ahead of a negative review or comment? If Google isn’t showing their website at the top of the results, these doctors are doing something wrong with their SEO strategy. This is just one reason why SEO for doctors is so important.

You may have already known that bad reviews outnumber good ones by a factor of 12:1 or that it costs seven times more money to secure a new patient than to service an existing one. But did you now that consumers are far more likely to complain about service on social media? More importantly, 92% of people trust their friends’ reviews, even if those reviews are inaccurate, biased or even just plain wrong.

This makes it increasingly important to control the online content that is getting published about you, your staff, your services and your practice. Rather than leaving it to the unknown, it’s critical to take control of that content and ensure yours is what’s seen first whenever a patient or prospective client searches your name, services or practice online. SEO makes that possible.

At Crystal Clear Digital Marketing, we understand SEO for doctors and what it takes to make sure your patients and prospects see the important content–that is, the content that explains the truth about you and the specializations that set your practice apart. This not only ensures your patients and prospects are properly informed but that they are also equipped with accurate information to make a decision.

When faced with a referral to your practice for the first time, it’s a well-known fact that today’s patients search your name online. What comes up at the very top of the Google, Bing, or Yahoo! results? A rant on ratemds.com from a patient who expected a full, pro-bono procedure when, in fact, she’d only booked a consultation…with a doctor across the street? Or information that you published on a blog or your very own website about the health benefits of that very same procedure?

SEO means ensuring your content shows up. By publishing targeted, relevant content in a specific and SEO-friendly manner, you ensure that information is quickly available on mobile and desktop formats. It appears and sticks to the very top of those search results, helping you make sure that once that patient or prospective patient reaches your website, he or she stays there rather than going somewhere else.

Known as “authority,” the placement of your content’s ranking in the results is crucial in not only attracting the right prospective patients to your website but in securing longevity in those search results. That means it’s important to know what content to publish in the first place. While specialization in the medical field might set you apart from your peers, it might not mean much online.

If your practice specializes in a particular procedure, you might think you’ll have little or no competition on Google. But type “liposuction” into your web browser, and you’ll quickly see the millions of results for that specialization.

Plus, no patient will search for a broad keyword like “liposuction” once he or she is seriously looking to undergo the procedure. Since you want the determined patient visiting your site to book their consultation, your content strategy needs to focus on targeted keywords that align with specific terms this patient might search online. Perhaps a more serious patient might search “liposuction in New York City,” or “liposuction in Queens.”

The right SEO strategy matches the serious patient searching for targeted keywords with your content. As a byproduct, your content marketing strategy also helps your website become a search engine-recognized authority, allowing it to climb above less-authoritative websites so that your content is seen first. That makes targeted content a win-win when done correctly.

At Crystal Clear Digital Marketing, we understand how to deploy a content marketing strategy that isolates information seekers from qualified prospects looking to book a consultation. Not only does targeted content ensure the right patients are visiting your site, but it also helps secure the right search engine results for the right searcher (aka future patient).

However, publishing targeted content on your website or blog is just one piece of the SEO pie. Today’s patients are active on all sorts of online media, including social networks. Which ones are important to your practice? How do you incorporate social networking into your SEO strategy?

Although content marketing certainly makes up a large portion of what you can do to improve what your patients learn about you and your practice online, ensuring that content gets noticed by the search engines is even more crucial. With search engines, as with your practice, it’s not a matter of “build it, and they will come.” The technical aspect, or the “how” of SEO, gets the right content online and encourages search engines to rank it at the top of their results.

On a very basic level, your SEO strategy begins with your website, both desktop and mobile. It’s not enough for your website to simply host your content and deliver it as quickly as search engines expect it to. Your website will also need to convert or convince your visitors to book their consultation specifically with your practice. And just as SEO for doctors has its nuances, so does website design. At Crystal Clear Digital Marketing, we specialize in marketing for the medical community, which includes website design and development that meets and exceeds search engine standards.

Advanced strategies such as linking, guest blogs, authority posts, email marketing and mobile marketing are also technical tools of the SEO trade. But all of that begins and (often) ends with directing patients and clients to your website content.

So, if your website is at one end of the spectrum, then social media is at the other end. This is where your online persona may or may not redirect patients to your website.

Social media represents one of the biggest opportunities for doctors. It’s not only where your patients and prospective patients spend time online, but it’s also where they discuss and chat about all types of issues—both regarding your area of specialization and about you, your staff, or your profession as a whole.

Since social media can impact your and your practice’s reputations in both good and bad ways, it’s important to pay attention to this space. Plus, deployed properly, a social media marketing strategy does two very important things: it allows your practice to engage and connect with people and their ongoing concerns, and it helps you supercharge your website’s content marketing and overall SEO strategies.

Our experience in social media marketing and SEO for doctors allow Crystal Clear to deliver a highly-focused strategy that broadens your online presence. This delivers results that will help your website develop the authority it needs.

SEO for doctors can be built up in many different ways. These include:

In many ways, SEO for doctors is simple because it involves a specialized niche: medicine. But in that same way, a specialization like that comes with its own challenges. Competition is both fierce and global—gone are the days of a letter to the editor that gets published in a community newspaper that nobody reads. Today’s digital world means someone in Springfield, MO can have a bad experience with Dr. John Doe, yet Dr. John Doe in Springfield, MA could be wrestling with that bad review thousands of miles away (don’t forget local targeting).

a talk gives you tips on how to use social media as a doctor

Social media has infiltrated our everyday lives – both personally and professionally. With most people keeping in touch with friends, family, and colleagues and monitoring the news cycle through multiple social media avenues, the question has shifted from if we should be using social media, to how we can make sure we use it to our benefit.

“Everything about how we communicate has changed,” said Mohamad Mohty, MD, PhD(@Mohty_EBMT), professor of hematology at the Clinical Hematology and Cellular Therapy Department at Hôpital Saint-Antoine, Université Pierre & Marie Curie in Paris, France. “Social media is felt to be increasingly important in plenty of things we do in health care, including academic projects, patient interactions, and research collaborations.”

Dr. Mohty was one of the panelists at a special education session at the 2017 ASH Annual Meeting that addressed how hematologists can effectively use social media. The session, titled “Quality Conversations on Social Media: Achieving Credibility and Efficiency Together” and chaired by Joseph Mikhael, MD, MEd (@jmikhaelmd), chair of the ASH Committee on Communications, featured Dr. Mohty and other panelists who discussed “best practices” for starting and maintaining conversations relevant to hematology on Twitter and other social media platforms.

A Double-Edged Sword

As Dr. Mohty and fellow panelists John P. Leonard, MD (@JohnPLeonardMD), and Elaine Schattner, MD, MA (@ESchattner), outlined, health care practitioners can use social media to their advantage in a number of ways.

In addition to enabling conversations with international collaborators, it can also open up new ways to help patients around the world. “It’s a tool for freedom,” Dr. Mohty said. “You don’t need a visa, you don’t need pre-authorization – it’s communication without borders that brings stakeholders in the community together to share experiences, to agree, to disagree, to comment,” Dr. Mohty said. “It’s a true added value.”

That immediacy, though, creates a demand for instant engagement that contradicts physicians’ roots in thoughtful consideration of evidence-based medicine. Also, when measured, considerate, and balanced ruminations about recently posted research findings are condensed into 280-character tweets, much can get lost in translation.

“With instant communication, you think less,” he said. “Your reaction needs to be matured before answering.” To avoid getting involved in “tweetstorms” or fruitless arguments on social media, Dr. Mohty applies a lesson he learned from replying to upsetting emails: “Embargo yourself.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to resist [responding immediately], because you want to attack,” he said. “But, if you want to do the right thing on social media, you need to create your own rules. There is no universal way to interact on social media – you need to decide what is most important to you.”

With so much of our daily lives moved online, people can lose sight of the consequences of these online interactions and of the value of “face-to-face” interactions, which would be a mistake, Dr. Mohty said. “Social media will never replace in-person interactions, because we need these close human relationships,” he said. “My advice is to be aware of the minuses and inconveniences [of this new technology]. Sometimes, they can hurt.”

The Rules of Engagement

Dr. Schattner, a journalist, patient advocate, and clinical associate professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, emphasized the value of social media in empowering patients.

“When patients go online, they are usually searching for information about a health condition,” she said. “The reality is that patients have less and less time with their doctors, and doctors increasingly may not be [an] expert in the particular issues that their patients ask them about. The need for information is extreme.”

Patients also use the internet to gather information on clinical trials or treatments that might not have been offered by their local physicians, and to look for other opinions altogether. “People used to go to other doctors. Now they go to other websites, follow certain disease-specific hashtags, and ask other patients online about where to go for more information.”

Social media also opens new avenues of communication between physicians and introduces the risk of oversharing – a tricky area to navigate because of legal issues surrounding doctor-patient confidentiality and professionalism.

Dr. Schattner said she believes patients understand and respect these issues, and doctors should in turn respect patients’ inquiries. “Most educated patients are not looking for specific answers to their medical problems online,” she said. “That said, I admire doctors who treat patients with respect. Some doctors only follow doctors – not patients or people who identify as patients. Whether or not you choose to follow people who are not physicians, I think if you acknowledge the legitimacy of their questions, that can go a long way.”

Social media platforms also invite informality, but Dr. Schattner advised the audience to keep it professional. “If doctors use words or phrases like ‘LOL’ or ‘garbage’ when referring to clinical trial results, for example, that can be hurtful to patients who are on those trials.” Patients are savvy enough to find and follow conversations about topics of interest to them, she said, adding “[physicians] should be careful, because patients may be paying closer attention than [doctors] realize.”

Maintaining privacy and safety online should also be of paramount concern, because some unwanted followers might be too close for comfort, Dr. Schattner noted. “There are creeps on the internet,” she said bluntly, “and because I have a significant following, at this point I have learned that directly.” Blocking and reporting spammers or users who employ hateful language or share violent images is a must for any doctor who wants to seriously use social media.

Dr. Schattner advised audience members to be careful about divulging details about their personal lives (such as their location or family, events they attend, etc.). “When I’m here, it’s useful for me professionally to reveal that I am in Atlanta for the ASH annual meeting,” she said, “but I’m not going to publish my family vacation plans on the internet.”

Tips and Tricks

According to Dr. Leonard, Richard T. Silver Distinguished Professor of Medicine and associate dean for clinical research at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York, deciding what to put on the internet is half the battle. He discussed best practices for taking full advantage of the connectivity and exposure inherent to social media.

Twitter can be helpful for shining a light on your institution, programs, work, and the work of colleagues, he said. Retweeting colleagues’ presentations or achievements to your followers – and providing your opinions – can be a great engagement tool.

For better engagement, Dr. Leonard noted, try to keep your posts interactive and, when possible, entertaining. Some doctors will use a lot of jargon, or will only post links to articles, and “that’s fine if you just want to talk to your colleagues on the internet,” Dr. Schattner agreed. “To make your Twitter feed or any social media feed interesting, though, it’s helpful to have a hobby. For me, it makes Twitter more fun.”

The back-and-forth comments and camaraderie that builds between users and followers is an essential aspect of social media. But Dr. Leonard warned, “Comment, don’t vent. It’s okay to comment and be excited about something you are posting, but be mindful of your language and reactions.”

And, of course, realize that not everyone online is following these same rules of engagement. In response to an audience member’s question about frustrating interactions on social media, Dr. Schattner advised that sometimes it’s best to just walk away from the situation. When conversations become argumentative, ignore them. “[These interactions] can be  hurtful to both sides – they are not helpful to patients, and they are not helpful to the people who tweet,” Dr. Schattner said.

The most important thing to remember is that social media is supposed to be informative and fun – not a burden professionally or personally. “Do it as much as you like,” Dr. Mohty said, “but it is not an obligation.”

An audience member noted that in the era of “alternative facts,” constantly correcting misinformation on the internet can be a burden. While the internet is rife with misinformation, “we are not in a position to police … Facebook or … what is said on Twitter, or in The New York Times for that matter,” Dr. Schattner said. “Conventional and new media all have some truths and some fallacies. My attitude is you can’t correct it all. I think patients, through better education, will gradually gravitate to people who prove to be reliable.”

For many people in remote regions access to healthcare is limited, so tech is coming to their aid.

"Stimulating competition is one of the main topics in most health care reform debates, and it has been a central issue in the Affordable Care Act in the United States since 2009. The goal of this paper is to use complex network methods to study dynamic and structure of competition under Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its evolution over time since its beginning until 2017. Using publicly available data, we construct a bipartite network of counties and insurance providers, create associated weighted single-mode networks, and analyze the evolution of network parameters that are related to competition and potential collusion in complex networks. These parameters have been previously tied to dynamics of collaboration and competition in earlier theoretical works. We argue that three parameters, namely network modularity, and eigenvector centrality mean and skewness are appropriate indicators of the overall competition in the insurance market. Based on these parameters, we show that the level of systemic competition among insurers as a function of time is an inverse U-shape trend, and that competition has returned back to what it was at the very beginning of ACA, indicating an undesirable resilience in the national health care system."

Dynamic Structure of Competition Networks in Affordable Care Act Insurance Market

David A Gianetto;  Mohsen Mosleh;  Babak Heydari

IEEE Access

DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2800659

Augmented Reality (AR) is the next big technical experience paving the way for emerging trends in Healthcare applications. In the simplest sense, AR technology could be a “combination of a real scene…

Advances in technology have changed healthcare practices and how doctors interact online. The widespread adoption of social networks is making a bigger impact on a physician’s day-to-day life, especially when consumers go online to look for health information and health providers.

Kantar Media's Healthcare Research Client Services division has gotten a clearer picture of how doctors are engaging with social media to interact with their peers and their patients. We also discovered which doctors are utilizing social media the most.

Importance of Social Media

Patients desire ways to connect with each other and healthcare professionals via social media. Therefore, it's crucial that doctors evolve their practices to meet this demand:

How Doctors Interact with Patients and Peers

According to Kantar Media’s 2017 Medical Surgical Sources and Interactions study, healthcare professionals are finding effective ways to utilize social media. For example, nearly half of all physicians surveyed (47%) say they have posted, followed or communicated with colleagues on professional social networks in the past 30 days via a computer or mobile device.

When communicating with healthcare consumers, nearly half of all doctors surveyed indicate they use a patient portal to interact with patients. Additionally, 7% say they use social media to communicate with specific patients or to promote their practice with a broad group of patients (an increase of one percentage point since last year). 

Which Doctors Value Social Media

18% of all doctors say they value Social Communities/Networks as a source of professional information. Of these:

Healthcare marketing has become a requisite for all organizations in the healthcare industry today. A significant shift is visible in the way people used to search for healthcare practitioners 10 years ago and how they do it today. According to a 2013 report by Pew Research Center, 72% of internet users look for health information online today. What does that mean for you as a healthcare service provider? It means that the smartest way to connect with service seekers is by meeting them where they are. At Social Media platforms! At Refresh Healthcare, we help healthcare practitioners and institutions connect with prospective patients using digital marketing at its best. Here’s how we can help you with the successful running of these 3 incredible campaigns. Campaign 1: Patient Awareness Programs Pick a local business such as a dentist, pharmacy or gym which isn’t a direct competitor. Partner with them by making services like flu shots, pet vaccines or specific drugs available for free or at discounted rates. For instance, you can have free flu shots at a nearby gym. This small effort will go a long way as a promotion for both - you and the gym. The event will only be a success if everyone shows up. To create awareness about it, we can help you design smart adverts, brochures and targeted digital content that will bring new patients to you. Source Campaign 2: Sharing is Caring Source Tags and shares in the pursuit of a giveaway are another great social media campaign scheme. This is especially ideal when the social presence of your institution goes stagnant and you want to reach out to more people. Promising people a special offer, discount or giveaway, practitioners can engage and connect with a wider audience using the same platform. A random winner can be selected at the end of the contest. For the successful running of any such campaign, it is important that the social media profile remains actively involved. Since most doctors and nurses won’t have the time, you can leave it to us to deliver your gratitude to all those who actively participate in the contest. We can handle your social media account and be as responsive as possible. Campaign 3: Meet the Doctor Series ‘Meet a Doctor’ series is another great campaign to connect with your doctors (current or potential) in a less formal setting. A Meet the Doctor series can embark on a rather more personal and a light journey of the doctors with them sharing the best, worst and most difficult challenges and cases in the lives of doctor’s nurses and hospital staff. The campaign can feature video interviews, a Question/Answer session in the form of a monthly newsletter, a webinar or even live session where patients can directly interact with their doctors. Source Tracking the Success Source The easiest way to track the success of your campaign and whether they lived up to your expectation or not, is by evaluating the impact it made. With the help of the right analytical tools and metrics, we can help you determine if the campaign was a hit or a miss. Using our expertise, we shall track any new likes, followers and shares on social media. We shall also trace new website visitors, what time they were most active, the number of new appointments and bookings etc. This way you will have a thorough idea of how big an impact you campaign was able to make.

Read more: The 3 Social Media Campaigns to Help Healthcare Practitioners Reach Out To Prospective Patients | Refresh Healthcare Blog | https://www.refreshhealthcare.biz/blog/healthcare-marketing/the-3-social-media-campaigns-to-help-healthcare-practitioners-reach-out-to-prospective-patients