Wisdom Blog

Your Web Presence – Fueling or Failing Your Wellness Practice? Here’s a bold but probably very true statement … your internet presence is most likely failing your health services practice. That means failing to meet the needs of your practice as well as failing the patients who need your services. By “Internet presence” we mean your website, your social media activity, online advertising, video publishing and any other digital means you use to create awareness about your practice and your specialties as a practitioner. We can make that statement with confidence because we’ve been actively engaged with healthcare industry marketing since the earliest days of the internet. We are highly tuned to analyze, diagnose, recommend and implement remedies for Healthcare, Wellness and Senior Living industry websites, social media channels and digital advertising campaigns. Almost every medical practice has a website these days; frankly very few of them are good. Don’t feel too bad if yours isn’t great because you’re not alone in your profession. In our experience, most healthcare web properties fall far short of accomplishing the needs of medical practices and wellness centers, as well as for the patients they serve. In order to fully do justice to your important life’s work, your presence on the web must not only fulfill the technical requirements of the internet, it must also communicate the spirit of your vital role in the much-needed revolution in healthcare. Two Topics – Powerful Leverage for Your Practice This is a two-part article covering essential sister topics that are critical to the success of your medical practice, as well as to your individual success as an administrator or practitioner in the field of Functional and Integrative Medicine. (1) The first article is about your need for a brand and a platform, “Building a Great Wellness Brand”. (2) This article, “Building Great Web Presence” is about how your presence on the internet can either make or break your ability to stand out as a unique practitioner of wellness services. You’ve invested heavily in the education and career specialties of your practice. These two crucial tips will maximize your return on those investments. The Patient/Practitioner Relationship has Changed Radically For most people of adult age today, the doctor/patient relationship in western countries has followed a pretty simple process for most of our lives … get sick or injured … find a general medicine physician or one who specializes in your therapeutic issue AND who accepts your insurance plan … get a diagnosis and prescription from him or her … take the pharmaceutical medication or therapeutic recommendation … rinse and repeat for each illness or malady. Two phenomena have changed that landscape entirely: 1) The rise of the internet as a health information resource 2) The rise of Functional and Integrative Medicine driving the healthcare revolution The Internet’s Power Over Your Practice The rise of the internet as a health and wellness information resource has made skills in digital marketing more important than ever for medical practices, especially for practices and practitioners committed to Functional and Integrative Medicine. According to research from McKinsey & Company, over 80% of consumers view digital solutions as the best way to meet their healthcare needs. Over 80% of healthcare consumers make their physician choices online prior to reaching out to a practice. If your online presence isn’t stellar, you don’t even know which patients you’re missing. Patient use of the internet includes finding doctors, checking health information, and monitoring health metrics. Other studies confirm that up to 85% of patient decisions to choose a care provider happen before they ever contact a practice. That means that your story told through the internet must be clear and compelling or you risk never seeing the face of patients who need your expertise. Beyond acquiring patients, the McKinsey research and other similar studies show that keeping patients is also heavily dependent on you having a website that confirms the treatments you prescribe and supports patient decisions to come back for more. Seven Typical Points of Website Failure and Risk Given the rapidly changing trends in the internet and its role in the consumerization of healthcare and Wellness, there are seven primary points of failure and risk that we typically find when analyzing Healthcare and Wellness industry websites: 1) Branding and Story-Telling Beyond your medical competencies and credentials, patients and their advocates want and need to know your story. It’s no longer enough to have an MD, DO, PhD, PA or NP behind your name. Patients and their caregivers want to know the “why” behind your “what”. Our sister article, “Building a Great Wellness Brand” describes exactly why that is critical to today’s health and wellness consumers. It also provides guidelines on what to do about it to the benefit of your practice. 2) Differentiation and Uniqueness The fields of health management and wellness are getting more and more crowded with practitioners offering tradition, allopathic services, as well as a wide range innovative solutions to addressing and preventing chronic illness. If your internet presence doesn’t clearly differentiate your practice and specialties, then the patients you want to attract won’t be able to find you through the fog and noise of a very loud marketplace. As we profiled in “Building a Great Wellness Brand” that challenge is even greater for practices and practitioners in the fields of Functional and Integrative Medicine. 3) Ensuring Security If you look at the bar where your website address appears in internet browsers, you’ll see several symbols that signify the security of your website and the data it manages. Those symbols not only indicate to your site visitors that it’s safe to browse your website. They also mean something very significant to your presence on the internet. Beginning in 2014, Google and other search engines began excluding websites in search results if those websites don’t contain proper security. Google’s policies have progressively become more restrictive over the last five years. Way more than half of the health and wellness websites we review don’t

Two Topics – Powerful Leverage for Your Practice This is a two-part article covering essential sister topics that are critical to the success of your medical practice, as well as to your individual success as an administrator or practitioner in the field of Functional and Integrative Medicine. (1) This first article is about your need for a brand and a platform, “Building a Great Wellness Brand“. (2) The second is about how your presence on the internet can either make or break your ability to stand out as a unique supplier of wellness products and services, “Building Great Web Presence“. The Essentials of Branding and Platforms for Wellness Professionals Differentiation in any industry is difficult. Standing out as a unique provider of Functional and Integrative Medicine services is exponentially more complicated. In the rapidly evolving fields of healthcare and wellness, you need a brand and a platform that enables you to promote and propel your brand. You’ve invested heavily in the education and career specialties of your practice. These two vital tips will maximize your return on those investments. New Translation of the Archimedes Principle In the 3rd century BC, Archimedes of Syracuse famously said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world”. The modern equivalent is, “Give me a brand and a platform from which to project it and I shall move the world”. Marketing experts across every industry stress the need for corporate brands, personal brands and “platforms” to give your brand a voice. These factors are essential for success in today’s noisy world. That challenge is even more difficult for practices and practitioners offering Functional and Integrative Medicine services. This article profiles that complexity and offers solutions that benefits providers and patients alike. Four Key Reasons Why Your Differentiation is Hard Work 1) Building Trust and Dispelling the “Alternative Therapy” Myth – Let’s face some hard truths … at least four or five generations of Americans have been indoctrinated into the belief that they can trust traditional, allopathic medical doctors, including the treatments they prescribe. Simultaneously, we’ve all heard the myth that doctors of osteopathy, chiropractic doctors and “alternative therapy” practitioners are “quacks”. Somehow, the medical and healing practices that worked for thousands of years became discredited “alternative” therapies and quackery upon the birth of modern medicine and pharmaceutical science. This dual mythology makes for a very steep hill to climb for you in building trust and credibility with patients. Meanwhile, the perception of trust is often already baked in with your traditional medicine counterparts. The majority of allopathic medicine physicians (MD), nurse practitioners (NP), physician assistants (PA) and therapists already have the inherent trust of their patients, which gives them the luxury of focusing solely on their practice. On the contrary, you carry the extra burden of constantly climbing the trust and credibility mountain while also focusing on helping your patients. 2) The Job of Curing People is Hard – The path you’ve chosen to actually cure people of chronic illnesses and acute conditions is a far more difficult road to travel than merely treating symptoms with pharmaceuticals and surgery. Therefore, the story you must tell about your methods, protocols and range of treatment modalities is far more complex. Quickly and efficiently conveying those messages to an often-skeptical population requires experience, skill and finesse. That professional competency is the art and science of marketing. 3) Patients are Getting Smarter and More Discerning – The Internet has turned everyone into a health expert. For any given symptom, a few minutes of Google searching will bring back libraries full of information, as well as speculation about what that symptom might mean. By the time your prospective patients reach your website, they are already armed with loads of information that they will compare against your specialties and credentials. Studies show that up to 85% of patient decisions to choose a care provider happen before they ever contact a practice. Your story must be clear and compelling to convince these discerning patients and their families to choose you. 4) Competition is Fierce and Getting More So – The expanding diversity of treatment modalities and methods is creating a broader and more complex set of decision choices for patients and their advocates. Savvy practitioners and therapists are finding more and more creative ways to tell their stories about why they’ve got the better approach. Your message must slice through that fog to clearly differentiate your practice and unique range of specialties. The Power of Why – Communicating Your Passion Perhaps the biggest reason to build your brand and platform is what the master marketing strategist, Simon Sinek calls “Start with Why”. According to Sinek, “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is not just to motivate people who need what you have, the goal is to inspire people who believe what you believe.”6 The process of developing your brand forces you to think about and articulate what you believe. Communicating what you believe will inspire and motivate patients to want the unique services you provide. To illustrate this point, we’ll profile how we constructed the “why” and brand of MindBody Talent. We understand that “what” MindBody Talent delivers is five categories of services that we provide to Functional and Integrative Medicine practices and practitioners: (1) executive recruiting, (2) strategy consulting, (3) coaching and training, (4) branding and marketing, and (5) technology solutions. That combination of services may make us unique in our chosen markets, but what makes those service lines really compelling is “why” we deliver them. What We Believe – The Driver of Our Passion We believe in the need to transform the fields of healthcare and wellness through the application of Functional and Integrative Medicine solutions. We believe that our country is long overdue for a revolution in healthcare. And we understand that our role is to help fuel that revolution by providing our services to Functional and Integrative