In a recent report published by Huge: Ideas, What Matters Now: The Patient Healthcare Experience, the case was made for health providers to team up with branded media companies for a number of reasons.
For one thing, search engines favor local companies. For large hospital systems, whose future may lie in specialized care, a carefully thought out content strategy needs to be in place to achieve the same ranking on the web—and reach the desired, larger audience.
For another, providing content isn’t the focus (a core competency) of most health care providers. While WebMD and Mayo may be credible sources, more specialized health providers have an opportunity to offer information that is more relevant to smaller, target markets.
Statistics quoted in the report support this position and indicate that up to 55 percent of internet users have researched a specific medical problem in the last calendar year, with 43 percent of all users having researched a medical treatment or procedure.
Then, too, one of the biggest challenges of health providers is to simplify content so that patients may more easily understand.
Certainly, the challenges of health providers are different than other “for-profit” companies. At issue are patient privacy and the caution of seeming to offer medical advice through social media. This past year, however, the FDA did release two draft guideline papers on the use of social media.
