Best Practices: Patient Photos in Medical Marketing

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The looks on your patients faces say it all; gratitude, relief, friendliness and trust. Without words they capture much of what you want prospective patients to know. With the right patient photo you can enhance your medical marketing, but you'll have to be careful in how you go about it.

Don't start snapping pictures until you have crafted a policy that will protect both your practice and your patients. Privacy regulations coupled with the sensitive nature of medical procedures make this imperative a must.

An important part of any policy regarding the use of patient photos in medical marketing is informed consent. You can find an excellent article on the Plastic Surgery Education Network website about the dos and dont's of using patient photos. The article includes a customizable consent form. They advise informing patients up-front how and where their photos will be used, e.g. educational, social media. And it would be a good idea to double check before the pictures go live to be sure your patients aren't having any second thoughts.

One more thing. When you save your patients photos use a number rather then their name so you don't accidentally leave back-door identifiers that could show up in an image search.

Good luck!

Get an SEO Boost with Hub Pages

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We like what Google likes. And for the time being Google treats hubpages.com as a quality source of content. So let's look at the nuts and bolts to see how hubpages can be used to bolster your medical SEO strategy.

The Hubs Blueprint
These single-topic web pages attract content writers looking to increase ad revenue or product sellers pushing their merchandising sites. When a new hub page is added to this massive informational site it tends to be indexed quickly, meaning that it may show up in search results faster than other recently added content. If you are building a new website for your practice create a handful of hub pages linking back to your site as they may generate a boost in ranking thanks to high-value backlinks.

The Guts of a Good Hub Page
Deep down hubs are meant to be informative and educational. Browse through the health categories and you will see that opinions from a real doctor would be extremely helpful. Creating a series of hub pages specific to your specialty will give you the opportunity to highlight your expertise and will provide readers with a trustworthy information source.

Don't neglect key words when building out your hub pages. Keyword optimize by creating content that targets the same keywords you use to rank your website or blog. Use those keywords as anchor text to link back to your site. Hub pages are social so you'll want to encourage your readers to engage in chats and comments. And you'll want to add followers with your hubs as social signals are important to your SEO strategy.

This may sound like too much extra work. If that is the case you may want to outsource the day-to-day management of hub pages to your social media partner.

Flash Forward: Healthcare Marketing in 2033

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Prognostication isn't easy especially when it comes to healthcare. Advancements in medicine have been rapid and profound over the last 100+ years. Today we are seeing great leaps in the merger of medicine and mobile technology. Pills that take pictures of your gut and pacemakers that can be programmed remotely already exist. We are not for from a time when all or our major vital signs will me monitored around the clock by nanomedibots in our bloodstream.

The gap between today's medical marketing best-practices and tomorrow's unimagined upgrades will be equally as vast. Imagine explaining medical social media to a doctor working when the internet was in its infancy.

None of us can know exactly what will be in use in 2033. All we can do is stay on top of our respective games. Let us do the medical marketing deep-thinking for you. You worry about those nanobots.

Diagnosis: Start a Doctor Blog. You're Overdue!

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To answer your question, yes, it is time to start a doctor blog. Your skill and exemplary service to your patients are enough. But, enough is not enough. Regional medical markets have become extremely competitive. A colleague with an active social media and blog presence will, not may, will poach potential patients in your area due to their higher search ranking.

Patients are hungry for information and when they need it they don't pick up the phone. As a successful doctor you are the source they trust most, the source they trust to deliver unbiased information. By providing concise and true details about topics of interest you will be providing a valuable service to current and potential patients. Added to which media outlets are constantly trolling for reliable quotes and opinions. You never know when a blog post could go viral earning you a shot at a much wider audience.

Hot Button Topics Include:

• Healthcare reform (Unbiased or in defense of, make it straight forward and they will appreciate it)
• Nurse and doctor shortages (how staffing problems impact patients now and what may happen in the coming years)
• Medicare reimbursement
• Emerging health threats (For instance those due to vaccine-preventable illness or antibiotic resistant bacteria)
• Workplace wellness programs

You have the knowledge patients search for. If you don't have the time to write the blog yourself hire a ghostwriting blogger to interview you and write the article(s) on your behalf. It is your thoughts that matter not the fingers that type them.

Medical Marketing: Naysayers are just Jealous

Big Pharma and healthcare insurance giants have been aggressively marketing their products and services for years. Their tactics are a core issue of complaint against the medical industry. For this reasons doctors have often chosen to quietly build a regional practice and let their work speak for itself.

But, today with cost of running a practice going up, the cost of medical school loans going up, the cost of malpractice insurance (as always) going up, doctors are delving into the world of marketing. It makes good business sense.

And with rise of social media medical marketing it is becoming a much more organic process. In the past doctors aimed for strong word-of-mouth. The same is true today, only that word-of-mouth message gets spread across forums and review sites, Twitter and Facebook likes.

It is imperative that doctors remain active in their marketing efforts. And it is strongly advised that they engage the services of a medical media marketing consultant. But, ultimately it is the strength of their practice and their bond with patients that will market their practice and build their business.

Medical marketing naysayers know this. If a colleague says, "You're doing well because you're always blogging and tweeting." What you should hear is, "Your doing well because you're talented and people are talking about you."

Reputation Management for Doctors: The Office Environment

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You don't have to wait out there. They do.

The waiting room is a hiding in plain site factor that needs to considered. The "Office Environment" is a growing area of focus for healthcare giants and private practices alike. Kaiser Permanente for example is putting both thought and money behind this issue. A well reviewed doctors office is about more than comfy chairs and new magazines. According to a HealthGrades survey it includes cleanliness, lighting, comfort and temperature. Creating a better waiting room environment may be easier than you realize. Here are a few suggestions.

• Fill the area with natural light or use LED lights that closely match the sun's spectrum.
• Update the wall coverings and flooring. A variety of easy-to-sanitize textiles and materials are available.
• Update the artwork on your walls and add non-allergenic plants throughout the office.
• Organize chairs and end tables into pods. This will give patients a greater sense of privacy.

Don't get us wrong, you can't rip a few pages out of style magazines and interior decorate your way to sterling online doctor reviews. It is simply one factor among many. You have to monitor patient reviews on the various doctor rating sites. You should hire an online marketing consulting firm to monitor and help mitigate any harmful reviews. And as always you must maintain a positive bedside manner, return calls promptly and make an effort to reduce wait times.

But, a good couch isn't just psychiatrist business, it's doctor business too. Improve your office environment and watch the reviews trend up!