Sabermetrics can be defined as the objective analysis of the game of baseball, specifically through the use of advanced statistics. One goal of sabermetrics is to remove certain biases in order to better understand the value each player possesses in relation to his peers. Certain traditional statistics, such as the pitcher win or the RBI, are loathed by sabermetricians because, although they don’t necessarily paint an accurate picture of a player’s skill, they are considered to be very important metrics during player evaluation.

Sabermetrics burst into the mainstream with the publication of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball. This book tells the story of Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics, and how he put together a winning baseball team on a shoestring budget by embracing certain advanced statistics. By determining which player traits were undervalued by the market and creatively acquiring players who excelled in those areas, Beane’s A’s were able to compete with teams whose payrolls were three or four times higher.
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For the past 99 weeks, the Dodge Communications blog has served up a new term or phrase each Friday that we thought every healthcare marketer should be familiar with. These “Words of the Week” all pertain to social media or the Web in some way, and many of them have a direct connection to the healthcare industry. For the 100^th edition, we thought it would be fun to take a look at where we’ve been and where we might be going.

The social media landscape is a crowded one. It seems as if for every social media tool out there, there is another tool available to make use of the original easier. Socialmention enhances your ability to search Twitter, and OpenID lets you use one set of login credentials for a multitude of sites. Now that your life is a little easier, let’s make it more convenient. With Digsby, your instant messaging, social networking and email all take place in one convenient desktop client. Excellent! Now let’s do something about your time-consuming daily news search. Search engines are nice, but there’s got to be something out there that will do all the work for you, right? Of course there is. Visit Alltop, an Internet news aggregator, to have instant access to the most recent headlines from the top news sources. For those of us interested in healthcare technology, Alltop’s Healthcare IT page was listed as one of the top three sources for healthcare IT news on the Web. Also in the top three is HITSphere, an aggregator solely dedicated to those in healthcare.
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We’re all familiar with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Dr. Watson, the trusty sidekick of master detective Sherlock Holmes. Now, nearly a century and a half after the original publication of those stories, another Dr. Watson is following in the footsteps of his predecessor. Back in February, Jeopardy! held a special contest between two past champions and an IBM supercomputer named Watson. What was so revolutionary about Watson was that not only could he (it) process information nearly instantaneously and return answers with a high level of accuracy, but Watson was taught (programmed) to understand the nuances of the human language, which is important both in trivia and in everyday life. If you tuned into Jeopardy! on those nights, you know that the humans were no match for their mechanical counterpart.

As Watson’s creators continue to improve the technology, IBM has said it intends for the supercomputer to enter the healthcare arena as a physician’s assistant. This article from Hospitals & Health Networks explains how Watson will be able to help physicians, especially when it comes to the quick and accurate diagnosis of patients.

Your average C-level executive probably still thinks that investing in a social media campaign constitutes thinking outside of the box. Though social media is extremely prevalent, even pervasive, in our everyday lives, it’s still tough to get the higher-ups to buy in. Concerns over ROI tend to add more questions than answers, and when a social media campaign does begin, it’s often very conservative.

 Several brands have shown, however, that if simply creating an online presence is thinking outside the box, then thinking further outside the box can really make waves. A couple years back, Burger King developed an app for Facebook that awarded a free Whopper to anyone who removed 10 of their friends. The catch? This act of defriending would be broadcast on the user’s newsfeed, so that the spurned parties were made well aware that they lost out to a burger. And just this week, Kraft announced its “Mac & Jinx” initiative, where if two people tweeted about mac & cheese at the same time, each would be sent a link. The first user to click the link would receive five free boxes of Kraft’s macaroni and cheese.

 This applies to the healthcare industry, too. While the opportunities may not seem as abundant as for large consumer brands, there is always a unique way to reach your audience. Whether it’s using Groupon to offer discounts to new patients or creating social networks that add an element of fun for diabetic children testing their glucose, the ideas are endless. Sometimes, just thinking outside of the box isn’t enough.

We’ve reached that time of year when trend pieces predicting the next great movement in social media begin to pop up. New concepts such as group buying and social commerce are common throughout these lists, and everyone agrees that our mobile devices will continue to play an increasing role in our everyday lives. There’s one question that’s not so new, but still is important for 2011: Will Twitter finally make the big push towards monetization? (The answer, by the way, is a definite maybe.) Through all this change in the social media landscape, one simple phrase holds true: Content is king.

This is especially true for B-to-B healthcare companies. Adapting to the online world is more important than ever. The barriers of social media are being broken down, it is no longer a world of early adopters, and just about every demographic has a healthy representation on the Internet. Being aware of what’s being said about your company and maintaining the ability to drive that conversation are no longer just the perks of being savvy, they are a requirement for success. But the content that you push out to your customers and prospects must be unique and valuable, otherwise your online presence can hurt you more than it helps. Here are a few ways to provide useful content to your audience while staying relevant in the social media world: (more…)

The Fifth Annual National Health IT Week is being held June 14 -18, 2010 in Washington, DC. Join us for this collaborative forum where public and private healthcare constituents will work in partnership to educate industry and policy stakeholders on the value of health IT for the US healthcare system. Now, with the enactment of economic stimulus and healthcare reform legislation, there is no better time for the health IT community to come together under one umbrella to raise national awareness!

As marketers, we try our best to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to social media, its tools and its practices, and we do our best to communicate the advantages of a strong online presence to our clients and our bosses. In healthcare, we often take for granted how the Web is being used by consumers. Sixty-one percent of American adults use sites such as WebMD to find healthcare information, surgeons tweet from the OR to update concerned family members, and “e-patient” is a term with its own Wikipedia entry.

So imagine my surprise when I came across this article from Healthcare IT News on “ePediatrics.” This article references two surveys, each concerning trends in the desire and ability of parents to communicate electronically with their children’s doctors. The first poll, conducted by C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Knowledge Networks, reports that approximately 50 percent of parents believe e-mail or online communication would be useful for tasks such as requesting prescription refills or medical records. However, the same poll reports that less than 15 percent of parents are currently able to communicate online with their children’s healthcare providers. In a similar study by Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, 90 percent of parents said they would like to be able to e-mail their pediatrician, but only 11 percent can currently do so.

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I remember my first experience with a URL shortener. While browsing a thread on a popular forum about Ultimate Frisbee, my sport of choice during college, I came across a post linking to an older discussion on the same topic. But I hesitated when I noticed the link was to something called TinyURL.com with a few numbers and letters after the slash. Where is this going to take me? I hope it’s not spam, I thought before I clicked through. When I landed safely on the old thread, I quickly put two and two together: this is some sort of service that makes http://groups.google.com/group/rec.sport.disc/browse_thread/thread/c0fa74cf7c46cd57# appear as http://tinyurl.com/2ace2bt. But why?

Just a few years (and over 100 different URL shorteners) later, there are more answers to that question than most healthcare marketers can keep up with.

For the average consumer, the most popular and practical use for these shortening services is to fit links into Twitter posts. With a 140 character limit, posting a link with 80-100 characters seriously handicaps the tweeter’s ability to post his thoughts. The improved aesthetic quality, as demonstrated above, is another popular reason to shorten a URL. When posting on a forum or in the comments section of a blog, where in-text linking is often not available, using a shortened URL gives your post a cleaner look that is more pleasing to the eye of the reader.

But what separates the different shortening services, and why is it important for healthcare marketers to choose the right shortener? The number one thing that public relations professionals have to answer for with any social media campaign is still ROI. The popular Twitter client HootSuite provides stats through its proprietary short link ow.ly. Any link posted with HootSuite is automatically converted to the ow.ly format, and stats are kept for each tweet that is sent out. Bit.ly, the most popular service with 3.4 billion links created in March of this year, has developed a fairly robust measurement system. As discussed in a past Word of the Week feature, with a free account, bit.ly users can keep up with the number of clicks that each created link has received. The service is also integrated with Twitter, which allows users to see each time the link is tweeted and retweeted. Your boss is bound to be less skeptical about Twitter when you let him know how many page views one tweet can generate, in addition to regular traffic.

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For the last three weeks, the tragic earthquake in Haiti has been top of mind for citizens of America and the world. As aid continues to pour in to Haiti, we’re beginning to see innovative ways in which medical treatment is being given. As we recently wrote, mHealth applications are making it easier to administer healthcare in remote areas and developing countries. The video below shows Dr. Elizabeth Cote, of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, collecting patient information in Haiti using an iPhone. The program she’s using is called iChart, and the developers have customized the software on short notice in order to comply with international disaster data collection standards.