Billian's HealthDATA Blog http://billianshealthdata.com/Knowledge/Blog Billian's HealthDATA Blog RSS Feed <![CDATA[The Social Sale: The ROI Elephant in the Room]]> http://www.billianshealthdata.com/Knowledge/Blog/2012/May/The_Social_Salex_The_ROI_Elephant_in_the_Room.html May 9, 2012
Interest and enthusiasm from the sales and marketing departments are great, but they do little to convince upper management that the time spent has a tangible impact on the bottom line. Social media return on investment is the elephant in the room at every sales and marketing meeting that broaches such topics. Five new fans on Facebook? Fifty new followers on Twitter? A few views on YouTube? The notion that any of these numbers automatically convert into sales is misleading, especially if a conversion strategy has not been developed, applied and analyzed.

A recent Smart Brief guide to social media ROI offers straightforward advice on how to quantify all those tweets the marketing department has been sending out, and/or the LinkedIn updates a star sales rep has posted (if a company is fortunate enough to have socially engaged sales people).

Step 1: Define Your Terms
SmartBrief breaks down the traditional equation of Results - Costs / Costs = ROI by defining "results" and "costs."

Results can be thought of as income, and cost reductions. Costs can include anything related to content creation, training, software and labor (belying the notion that social media is "free").

Step 2: Establish Goals and Benchmarks
Two comments in the guide should especially resonate with those in B2B sales:

"The rise of social media did not create any new business objectives; it just created new ways to reach them."

"If you're looking at sales, ... don't just look at your total sales revenue for the quarter - you may also want to take into account the number of transactions, the average order size, the cost per acquisition, etc."

In other words, gaining 100 new followers shouldn't be the goal. It should merely be a benchmark utilized as part of a greater social media strategy. For example, a healthcare vendor may run a social campaign that gains it 100 followers on Twitter. Three months after the campaign ends, one of those new followers may decide to purchase an EMR system from said vendor. It's pretty likely that a company's presence on Twitter was NOT the impetus for the follower's EMR purchase. But the sales and marketing teams should take note that it did have a part to play, and hopefully the purchase price of the EMR offset the cost of the campaign by more than a few percentage points.

Step 3: Implement and Experiment
SmartBrief breaks this step down into three options:   
  • Measure key performance indicators against a baseline at regular intervals.
  • Use coupons, order codes, loyalty programs or some other mechanism (web  forms with unique links are a popular B2B option) to identify and track brand interactions.
  • Track and analyze user sentiment. This is tricky - and not entirely reliable thanks to computer software's limited ability to gauge sarcasm, idioms and vague language - but there are applications that can do it well enough.
Step 4: Evolve
It's hard not to evolve in healthcare these days, as healthcare reform has vendors developing new solutions at a rapid pace, and providers attempting to adopt them just as quickly in a meaningful way. Simply keeping up with the Joneses (or the Dells) in an effort to stay current with social selling techniques will ultimately result in backsliding in any number of areas. Evolution should occur at the enterprise level.

"These changes could involve technology, such as the adoption of social media platforms for communication. They could be process oriented, as employees adopt new methods of training. But the biggest changes have to do with company culture, as social tools can promote the exchange of ideas as part of daily office life."

This statement echoes what a recent McKinsey & Co. survey found on how social technologies are extending the organization: "When adopted at scale across an emerging type of networked enterprise and integrated into the work processes of employees, social technologies can boost a company's financial performance and market share."

Businesses may consider adding "Innovate" as a fifth step. As the McKinsey survey respondents noted, "If organizational barriers to the use of social technologies diminish, they could form the core of entirely new business processes that may radically improve performance."

Innovations could include developing a social media analytics platform in-house, or establishing new service lines around ideas inspired by social conversations. Evolution will help a business survive, but innovation will ensure that it prospers.







]]> <![CDATA[Better Business in 2012: The Promise in Long-Term Care]]> http://www.billianshealthdata.com/Knowledge/Blog/2012/April/BBB.html April 26, 2012
As the average patient age skews higher and long-term care facilities gear up to play host to a greater number of healthcare episodes, geriatric care promises to dominate the future healthcare landscape.

infocus_census

From widespread, long-term care market press coverage to television commercials with a more mature audience in mind, the shift to "senior-centric" is taking root.

Here are a few long-term care market trends that those in and aligned to the field should keep in mind as future business plans are drawn:

1) Staffing Shortages
The already-taxed long-term care workforce is sure to see additional staff shortages as patient populations swell and Home Health and other alternatives to institutional care crop up. Demand for job candidate recruiting, screening and training programs will climb as facilities strive to keep staff-to-patient ratios in check.

2) Supply & Technology Needs
From medical equipment to monitoring devices, patient influx will increase supply demand across the board. The need to bring mounting episodes of long-term care into the EHR fold will put technology resource needs in the spotlight. The 'age-in-place' demands of today's senior sector have produced a healthcare microcosm, with ample room for the exploration of innovative new patient engagement scenarios that go beyond the walls of the healthcare institution. Patient engagement technologies developed with the long-term care patient subset in mind - where patient complications frequently necessitate work-arounds to traditional facility-setting care arrangements - could even have legs in other care settings.

3) Financial Flexibility
Traditionally a fiscally-strapped field, long-term care facilities will need to explore new financing arrangements to help offset the burden of additional costs that will come with increased patient demand.  Government-sponsored reform initiatives aimed at elder care and long-term care involvement may loom on the horizon. Better integration of care through the establishment of ACO models will (eventually) bring long-term care to the care-continuum roundtable, which may also introduce new fiscal incentives for long-term care.

To date, healthcare initiatives promoting better patient care, lowered costs and improved operational efficiency have largely been aimed at inpatient and acute care settings.  While both healthcare reform and modern culture have tended to relegate seniors to backburner status, what's destined to unfold in long-term care holds promise.

Long-term care advances may just usher in a new healthcare frontier that takes more than end-of-life assistance to the patient household setting. Long-term care may find itself at the forefront of a healthcare revolution sooner than expected.







]]> <![CDATA[The Social Sale: Understanding B2B Social Commerce]]> http://www.billianshealthdata.com/Knowledge/Blog/2012/April/The_Social_Sale.html April 12, 2012
Underlying these concepts from a sales and marketing perspective is the notion of social commerce, which social marketing management software provider Awareness Inc. explains is "the use of social technologies to connect, listen, understand and engage to improve the shopping experience."

While not a new idea by any means, especially in the B2C world, social commerce has been a bit slower to take the B2B sales and marketing by storm. As with most B2B verticals, healthcare companies want to be assured of a solid return on investment, even when it comes to using free social media tools. Companies of any stripe must ask themselves, 'how will social media campaigns, despite their cost-effectiveness, compare to traditional marketing campaigns?' Just because it's free, doesn't mean it's worth it, especially when valuable man-hours are involved that could be spent creating something else that could ultimately yield better results.

A recent Awareness e-book, " Social Commerce Lessons: The 6 Social Principles that Increase Sales," highlights the fact that the "Social Principles underlying the meteoric success of social commerce can be applied to more successfully attract prospects, more reliably nurture them through the sales and marketing funnel, and more consistently delight them once they become customers. These same principles can help brands attract influencers and break through to the media."

It goes on to highlight companies like Groupon, the Gap, Levi's and P&G - all of which have used social media campaigns to connect, listen, understand and engage shoppers, or, as Awareness puts it, "to create and deepen relationships in order to nurture prospects toward purchase, one step at a time."

Though the scale might be different, this idea of nurturing one step at a time is fundamental to the B2B sales process, particularly in healthcare, as purchase decisions relating to patient care are (in most cases) not made lightly or hastily. A recent social media campaign created by HUNTER Technical Resources highlights the value recruiting firms find in connecting with potential job candidates via social media platforms. The Atlanta-based firm, with ties to healthcare IT, recently sent emails to its database requesting recipients "Like" the company's Facebook page, or "Follow" its Twitter account for a chance to win an iPad. The deployment resulted in between 700 and 800 new fans - a big success according to the company's president, Scott Hall. These new fans will now be exposed to HUNTER's social media messaging on a consistent basis, likely leading to a few being recruited in the near future for various positions.

Why go with a social campaign to attract new contacts, rather than a more traditional e-mail campaign? "HUNTER's marketing goal is always start a dialogue with our audience," explains Douglas Kling, Director of Recruiting. "Social media allows us to engage in a true 'back and forth' with our customer base, which is something that traditional marketing tools don't always allow."

Billian's HealthDATA affiliate HITR.com is doing something similar via its Nurse TECH Talk blog. The current "Bodacious Scrubs" Contest invites nurses to submit their snazziest (or most unusual) fashions for a chance to win an AmEx gift card. It's a fun, relatively effortless way to engage current readers of the blog. Marketing it through various social media channels will hopefully attract new readers, and perhaps lead to a few joining the HITR.com community.

As Better Business blogger and Billian's HealthDATA Product Manager Jessica Clifton notes, "The beauty of social - especially in a business/sales scenario - is that it's marketing on the recipient's terms. They opt in, decide on next steps, if and when they want to interact - it's easier to avoid 'noise.'"

Or, as Kling mentioned above, the principles of social commerce make it easier to engage prospects and customers in a true back and forth.







]]> <![CDATA[Recent Healthcare Studies Highlight Need to Move Beyond Measurement]]> http://www.billianshealthdata.com/Knowledge/Blog/2012/March/Health_Affairs.html March 21, 2012 study (no, not the one that piqued ONC Director Farzad Mostashari's interest - more on that later) has shed light not only on the impact Medicare's public reporting initiative on hospital quality has had on mortality, but on the need for further, in-depth and more meaningful analysis of these types of reports. The authors concluded that "the fact that hospitals had to report quality data under Hospital Compare led to no reductions in mortality beyond existing trends for heart attack and pneumonia and led to a modest reduction in mortality for heart failure. We conclude that Medicare's public reporting initiative for hospitals has had a minimal impact on patient mortality."

From an editorial perspective (not a statistical one), this conclusion may be a bit shortsighted. While performance transparency may prompt some to strive for better results, that desire alone doesn't affect the actual change. Just as Mostashari found fault with a separate Health Affairs study that questioned whether investment in healthcare IT would lead to cost savings, so must readers question the impact simply measuring data has on clinical outcomes.

The change to healthcare outcomes doesn't just come from measuring - that's just the jump-off point. Once measures are obtained, insights must be gleaned. Are there gaps/shortcomings? What other common factors exist among those that perform well and those that perform poorly? Only then can potential improvement variables be implemented so practitioners can take it from the top and determine which solutions impact the measures in a positive way.

It's like Dr. Oz said - you have to move from information to awareness. That's what business intelligence is all about - making sense of the "information noise" to improve outcomes. Data made actionable is what's meaningful.

The Health Affairs study concludes by calling for future research to determine better structure for the Hospital Compare program with two aims: improving patient outcomes and more effectively encouraging patients to use high-quality hospitals. While at first glance such a statement seems redundant, the dual aim actually feeds into itself and helps to set up a continuous cycle of improvement. Just as it is not sufficient to merely cite statistics when measuring and comparing quality outcomes, it is not sufficient to merely improve patient outcomes across the board. The purpose of Hospital Compare should be to funnel patients to higher-quality hospitals, ensuring competition and continued improvement. Highly satisfied patients wouldn't be bad, either.







]]> <![CDATA[Better Business in 2012: Strategies of a Sales Champ]]> http://www.billianshealthdata.com/Knowledge/Blog/2012/March/Better_Business.html March 21, 2012
Over 500 students representing 65 of the top grad and undergrad sales programs in the US, Canada and Belgium descended on Atlanta neighbor Kennesaw State University (KSU), host site to the annual event.

nathan
Nathan Lenyszyn, Billian's HealthDATA Sales Executive
and winner of the recent National Collegiate Sales Competition

Lenyszyn, a first-time participant, was one of two members representing KSU's first graduate-level team.  Judged by more than 70 of the top sales faculty in the US, the three-round software sales simulation challenge gauged participants' effectiveness at:   
  1. Approach and Needs Identification   
  2. Presentation and Closing   
  3. Follow-up and Account Maintenance
The contest prize - a trophy, bragging rights, and a $1000 custom-made suit care of Tom James - is perhaps eclipsed by the networking and job placement potential the competition offers advancing sales professionals.  Sponsored and attended by prominent Fortune 500 companies looking to recruit promising talent, over 70% of participants leave the event with a job offer, according to NCSC director Terry Loe.

Lenyszyn, who won in the categories of Needs Identification, Team Sales, and Overall Team Championship, offers some insight into his experience: 

Why did you decide to participate in the NCSC?
Last fall, walking the halls of KSU's business school, I noticed a flyer from last year's NCSC and decided to learn more. Though I had focused my MBA electives on marketing, I had not been able to further "sharpen the axe" in terms of my primary work experience (professional sales).

I decided to participate because of the experience offered. Highly successful sales executives and managers from some of the best companies in the country conducted role-play selling scenarios with me leading up to the competition. The coaching and insights that they and Dr. Leila Borders, my KSU mentor, provided have already enabled me to be more effective in my role at Billian's HealthDATA. The event itself proved to be a great networking opportunity.

Other than the prize, what else were you hoping to get out of your experience?
My MBA curriculum has allowed me to focus on marketing.  I was hoping to round out my MBA with Professional Sales coaching. The biggest prize was being able to have almost undivided attention from one of the KSU Sales Center Professors twice a week for several months. Dr. Borders and KSU essentially gave me a condensed version of what an undergraduate in the KSU Professional Sales program would learn over four years. Even better, this condensed training was tailored to my specific style!

Fortunately, the competition is focused purely on B2B, so the experience is very relevant. I plan to continue working with the KSU Center for Professional Selling, helping future KSU undergraduate and graduate competitors prepare for the NCSC. As my career advances, it will be important for me to coach others as they work to become better sales professionals.

What skills did you have to demonstrate during the competition?
Three different groups ran the competition. First was the buyer - typically a high level sales executive from the community. Second was the seller (the student). Third was the panel of judges who watched the role-play via video feed.

The buyer was given a detailed profile to follow and the seller was given a profile missing key points that must be uncovered. The panel of judges rated my performance on a specific rubric. 

My strategy in winning involved meshing my real-world experience from Billian's HealthDATA and AMN Healthcare with the NCSC rubric, which focuses on appointment time management, effective communication, building rapport, needs identification, persuasive presentation, handling objections, negotiations and closing.

In what section/segment did you feel you clinched the win?
I feel that my experiences as a physician recruiter and a B2B sales executive have honed my ability to uncover hidden buyer needs and motivations. By truly understanding my prospect, I was able to tailor an effective presentation and satisfy any lingering objections the buyer had before asking for the business one final time.

What advice can you offer to other B2B sales professionals?
Understanding your client/prospect is paramount. Once you are able to build rapport and learn what is really important to your client/prospect, you know how to deliver the right solution. This strategy is rewarded in the competition because it translates into building lasting business relationships in the real world.







]]> <![CDATA[The Social Sale: Going the Extra Mile with LinkedIn]]> http://www.billianshealthdata.com/Knowledge/Blog/2012/March/The_Social_Salex_LinkedIn.html March 8, 2012
  • Buyers complete 80% of the buying cycle before interacting with sales.
  • 44% conduct anonymous research of a select group of vendors.
  • 41% followed discussions to learn more about a specific topic of interest.
  • 37% posted questions on social networking sites looking for suggestions and feedback.
  • More than 20% connected directly with potential solution providers via social networking channels.
The presenters spent much of their time focused on how to effectively leverage LinkedIn, a social networking platform that most folks in healthcare IT are more than a little familiar, and hopefully extremely comfortable, with.

Billian's HealthDATA sat down with Giamanco, CEO of Talent Builders Inc., to learn more about how sales teams can begin to utilize LinkedIn more effectively for the social sale.

Use "advanced people search" to create a lead generation list based on the ideal target for the person you are trying to reach. 
For example, my target audience is the Sales VP or Director of Sales in a mid-sized company or enterprise account. When I click on "advanced search," I can set up the search using the titles that I want to find. I can further refine the search by geographic location using a business zip code and choosing a 10, 25, 35, 50, 75 or 100-mile radius. Further refine the list by choosing the industry you typically sell to.

Once you've entered your criteria, click on the search button and receive your results. But the real power of the list comes in "saving" it and with the free LinkedIn version, you can create and save three different lists. What's so great about saving the list is that LinkedIn then goes to work for you. Each Monday, you receive an email with a summary of the all the new people matching your search criteria who have joined your network or a group that you belong to. This becomes a real-time, golden list for you to use in prospecting.

Next, figure out whom you have in common with the person you want to meet and ask them to help you secure the introduction. But don't forget to offer to help them in return! 

Pick a key group where your ideal buyer is likely to participate and add to the discussion.
This is an excellent way for more people to get to know you and your expertise. You don't use groups to "sell," but rather answer discussion questions that help to educate and inform, as well as help others. Again, this isn't the place to be self-serving. Contribute your expertise and talent and people will want to connect with you. Happens to me all the time, and many of those connections have turned into great business referrals.

Host a mini-networking meeting
You can export your LinkedIn contacts to an Excel spreadsheet. Set up a meeting with a few colleagues, bring your list and find ways to help each other connect with people or companies you are targeting. Better yet, bring your iPad or mobile with your LinkedIn contacts to the meeting and save yourself the time of printing off paper. This makes your referral building time far more productive. If I am meeting with you and you're trying to reach someone in particular, I can look them up to see if I know them or someone in my network does. Right then, we can plan an approach to help you get introduced.

Use "Events" to create sales opportunities
Host an educational webinar to get people introduced to the services that you offer. Educate - leave the hard sell at home. Promote your events using the LinkedIn® events application located under the "More" tab. Share with people in your network and ask them to pass it on.

Status Update Strategy
The "share an update" section lets you share information about what you are doing. Get out of the mindset that it's about telling people where you have been or what you had for lunch. Use it strategically:
  • Post information about others.
  • Let people know if you are speaking at an event and give credit to the venue or the hosts.
  • Use LinkedIn Today under the "news" tab to share industry trade articles or blog posts that you feel your prospects would benefit from reading.
  • Share a customer case study or industry research conducted by your company.
Giamanco offers a number of additional tips in her LinkedIn How To Guide, which readers can download by clicking here.





]]> <![CDATA[Better Business in 2012: Conventional Wisdom in Healthcare and Beyond]]> http://www.billianshealthdata.com/Knowledge/Blog/2012/February/Better_Business_in_2012_Conventional_Wisdom_in_Healthcare_and_Beyond.html February 21, 2012
The following words of conventional wisdom are offered to remind, inspire and encourage as you traverse the path towards better, more meaningful business, in healthcare and beyond:

"In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy."
- John Paul Getty

Never underestimate the impact of a fresh perspective. The erected edifices of established business can cast shadows on new ways of doing things. Think beyond the walls of where you are now. If these walls obscure your view, don't be afraid to tear down and re-engineer them, unadulterated.

Don't lose sight of where the market is headed while you're busy with business-as-usual today. Proactive planning now beats the hours of reactive over-time that come with having to abruptly shift gears to keep up with new or changing markets. Seek out resources to keep you informed and in touch with what's looming.

"You don't have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great."
- Les Brown

Keep the big picture in mind, but at bay. Staring at a to-do list with a long list of items left undone can have a debilitating effect that feels anything but productive. Progress towards big goals in small, manageable stages to avoid feeling overwhelmed.

Begin with the right insight and a well-thought-out plan of action. The foundation laid in the initial stages of transition is critical to success.

Avoid burnout and stagnation by doing or discovering something that reminds you why you're passionate about what you do.

"Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress.
Working together is success." - Henry Ford

Approach decision-making as a team to divide the load and ensure that each unique business perspective is part of the discourse from the word go. Give administrative, sales, marketing and development teams access to the same business insights and resources, keeping cross-departmental teams in-step.

Celebrate minor successes as you inch toward the greater goal. Acknowledgement from leadership and encouragement from peers serves the greater good of the entire establishment.

Have any optimistic aphorisms or business inspiration of your own?
Share words that have resonated with you on Twitter using the #betterbusiness hash tag.







]]> <![CDATA[Lessons Learned from Healthcare IT's Past]]> http://www.billianshealthdata.com/Knowledge/Blog/2012/February/Lessons_to_be_Learned_from_Healthcare_ITxs_Past.html February 21, 2012
His canvas was broad in detailing any number of changes in technology and healthcare technology over the last 20 years, but his specific focus was on what he called the four I's of technology -  Infrastructure, Instrumentation, Informatics and Innovation.

In short, he compared the adoption of programs that are sweeping the landscape like Epic with the equally prevalent adoption of programs like SAP some 10 to 15 years ago.  He said this:

"There's a parallel between what is going on in healthcare today and what went on in financial services and other industries almost 20 years ago. You remember all the bad press about ERP, and how Accenture was getting rich, and Deloitte ... and all these other failed projects trying to implement Oracle, or SAP or what have you. 

"But if you look at financial services, they climbed the same maturity curve.  In the 60's and 70's, they automated the back office (so they were building infrastructure), in the 80's and early 90's they automated the front office with ERP (so they were completing their instrumentation), then in the latter part of the 90's and early 2000's, they really got good at the informatics piece, and changing data into information, and then in the mid-2000's through 2008, before the world fell off the cliff, a lot of those businesses got very innovative based upon the information they had produced, from the instrumentation and infrastructure they had. 

Interestingly, this CIO hails from the United States and served multiple hospitals as a CIO before moving to Canada, so his perspective is not Canadian-centric, but instead informed on the ways of technology in both Canadian and American hospitals. He's seen both and worked with both. So, he's not looking for a parallel between healthcare technology and what could today be called traditional IT. He's commenting on his own experience and drawing striking conclusions that the rest of us can learn from.

And, for anyone quietly wondering, so what's to be done with this EMR?, here's one bit more:

"So there's an Infrastructure function. And that's not just the boxes and the wires, but it's also the people, and the skills, and the processes, and the tools that are used.

 "And then on top of that infrastructure function, there's what we call Instrumentation.  And so you think of an EMR - that's in essence instrumentation of the clinical function - the same way ERP is instrumentation of many administrative functions. 

So there's a whole set of these instruments that you have to embed in your organization in order to produce data, to be used to manage.  And most healthcare organizations are busy in that instrumentation phase, because the whole clinical process has been poorly instrumented to date.  The financial process is a little better, but even that one could use a little improvement.  

"Then the third layer is Informatics (which is what we call it), but you could call it business intelligence.  And then the fourth layer is Innovation.  But that's really the results. 

Hospitals may have infrastructure, or systems that are producing data.  Real innovators may even have the beginnings of informatics or business intelligence that are turning data into actionable information.  But unless hospitals can actually do something with that information, which is to improve healthcare, it's not worth very much.

hitprojectmgrslogoJack Williams is President of HealthIT Project Managers, a division of Jackson Healthcare that provides experienced, temporary staffing resources to hospitals in order to help health IT leaders move their projects to completion.







]]> <![CDATA[The Social Sale: Fitting Social Media into the Sales Funnel]]> http://www.billianshealthdata.com/Knowledge/Blog/2012/February/The_Social_Salex_Fitting_Social_Media_into_the_Sales_Funnel.html February 9, 2012
  • 75 percent of marketing executives surveyed believe social media marketing has a positive impact on their business   
  • 65 percent of respondents would like to invest more resources in social media marketing   
  • Over 70 percent expect to increase their use of Twitter and LinkedIn in 2012   
  • Just over half of respondents are using qualified leads as a key ROI metric for social media marketing.
These statistics help shore up the notion that social media marketing practices are continuing to grow, and as such, beginning to spill over into the sales side of the house.

As marketing and sales departments begin to take baby steps to incorporate social media strategies into their daily routines, they are having to rethink just what those routines should be. Take the timeless sales funnel - new opportunities go in at the top, go through the pipeline, and arrive at the bottom as maintained accounts.

Juxtapose this traditional graphic with the newer social sales funnel, where initial brand exposure ultimately leads to not just new customers, but enthusiastic brand evangelists.

socialsalesfunnelcms The combining of these two funnels is what many B2B companies are in the process of figuring out. 

Jennifer Dunphy, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Vayu Media, spoke of the broad applicability that social media offers along the sales funnel at the recent SoCon12 marketing conference in Atlanta. She also concentrated on the value that brand exposure via social media can bring to lead generation, noting that 57 percent of respondents believe search engine optimization (SEO) has the biggest impact on a B2B's lead-generation goals.

Dunphy put it all into perspective with the remark that "So much discussion in the SEO community today centers around social media because of its potential to drive traffic, increase awareness and build links. The challenge of this medium, though, is to marry social media tactics with real business goals.

"It will be up to each individual company to determine the amount of time, money and strategy necessary to bring about truly qualified leads.

Here are 3 Ways That Billian's HealthDATA is Using Social Media to Drive Sales
  1. Daily engagement on multiple social media platforms - results in exponentially increased brand awareness across followers' individual networks
  2. Distribution via social media of unique editorial content authored by the BHD team as well as thought leaders within the company's customer base - establishes Billian's HealthDATA as a trusted authority on healthcare industry-related challenges, which in turn helps to further establish trust in its sales and marketing products
  3. Taking social relationships offline - constant engagement with customers and prospects via social media results in the ability to easily transfer an online relationship to an in-person relationship
Need social media marketing or sales advice? Chat with Billian's HealthDATA and Porter Research Social Marketing Director Jennifer Dennard at the HIMSS12 Social Media Genius Bar, Wednesday, Feb. 22nd from 10-11 a.m. The bar will be located within the HIMSS Social Media Center in Hall C. During this hour-long session, Jennifer and other social media experts will be available to aspiring and established bloggers and social media users to offer personalized feedback on their social media and blogging strategies and tactics, as well as offer direction on how to make improvements. Walk-ins are welcome or make appointments online by clicking here.








]]> <![CDATA[The EMR and the Two-Fingered Typist]]> http://www.billianshealthdata.com/Knowledge/Blog/2012/February/The_EMR_and_the_Two-Fingered_Typist.html February 6, 2012
The forgotten piece of the puzzle, however, is the more experienced physician - the one who's made a living addressing their patient's every health concern and documenting the old-fashioned way - with pen on paper. As these providers are being gently swayed to adoption of an EMR, the patient population in many communities will suffer. Adoption consumes time and money, and physicians nearing retirement are struggling with the investment in an EMR system. The time and frustration of learning a new system can, at times, be almost too much for a less computer-savvy physician to bear, and this is not the only factor this group is contemplating regarding their future. And EMR is a huge financial investment that may not be completely returned by the time these physicians are ready to retire.   

The most important point that seems to be overlooked in this discussion is the enormous amount of knowledge being lost by taking the focus away from these elder statesmen. Instead of building upon the expertise of physicians and nurses that have been in the trenches year after year, many of those in government and, unfortunately, the C-suite, label them as non-conformists and reluctant to change. EMR regulations should be examined and a compromise reached to ensure these knowledgeable colleagues continue to practice and serve their communities as long as possible. Because, in the end, is it more important to have all the boxes checked or the ailments cured? Hopefully both can be achieved, but the line walked is growing tighter as frustrations continue to grow.







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