Social Media and Healthcare: Together They Can Rule the World

Let us first talk about social media and its growing importance; Facebook has more than 1 billion users, Twitter has 500 million, and platforms like Pinterest and Instagram are growing just as rapidly. In fact, we will be starting a BBG&G Pinterest page soon!

Social is here to stay and is where consumers are increasingly spending their time interacting, learning and being influenced. Healthcare marketing should generate vibrant, engaging and real-time online identities to benefit from these new behaviors. 

Now we can focus on the new breed of patients. Consumers are seeking to take a more active role in their own healthcare.  As frustrating as it often is to physicians and other healthcare professionals, patients are no longer content with handing over their complete trust. Before they walk into a medical office, they want to be certain they know everything — including the illness they are sure they have. This is where social media sites can really come into play. Creating pages for your medical practice or associating with social sites that are dedicated to illnesses, treatments, and healthy living is a great idea. Patients are doing their research, so it’s important to have complete and correct information online for them!

Understanding this new breed of empowered patients plus understanding the rise of digital, social, and mobile marketing is becoming a necessity. People want the information and they want it to be easily accessible and even customized to their own preferences and needs. 

Our job at BBG&G is to ensure that our work is not simply innovative, but relevant and compelling enough to produce changes in awareness, behavior, and sales. We understand the changing healthcare market and do our best to provide you with results to positively impact your bottom line.

Mobile Health

Consumers are becoming more and more reliant on their smartphones; just thinking about a day without mine frightens me! This information presents a great opportunity for health care professionals to develop inventive strategies to reach and engage with consumers when they are on the go — from disease management to remote health monitoring, and beyond.

The mobile health movement (also known as ‘mHealth’) has fully emerged. There are a number of mobile health apps out there, but they are low quality. These apps are typically “unsponsored,” meaning there is no professional medical company running them. “Sponsored” apps are what patients want. Sponsored apps are supported by insurance companies, healthcare providers and other medical institutions, which ultimately result in higher patient adoption and engagement of an app.

Are you a healthcare provider and do not know where to start? Happtique is the first mobile application store, think of it as comparable to the ITunes store, developed by healthcare professionals for healthcare professionals. Happtique offers healthcare enterprises — like hospitals, continuing care facilities, and physician practices — the ability to create individually branded and secure apps that support patient mobile technology use.

The rising need of healthcare is matched by rising costs; both are only expected to increase. Providentially, mobile technology and innovation are positioned to take healthcare in a more resourceful direction. Surrendering to mHealth is your only option as patients are becoming more proactive. It will guide your on-the-go patients on a path to safer health practices and self-care. With one-fifth of Americans owning smartphones, instant access to healthcare is an important trend in 2013.

The world of healthcare is changing fast. Providers that are in the forefront of change will benefit greatly, as will their patients.