4th blog

Web analytics in Health Care

“Web Analytics is the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives.”

Web analytics is the process of analyzing the behavior of visitors to a Web site. The use of Web analytics is said to enable a business to attract more visitors, retain or attract new customers for goods or services, or to increase the dollar volume each customer spends.

Web analytics is often used as part of customer relationship management analytics. The analysis can include determining the likelihood that a given customer will repurchase a product after having purchased it in the past, personalizing the site to customers who visit it repeatedly, monitoring the dollar volume of purchases made by individual customers or by specific groups of customers, observing the geographic regions from which the most and the least customers visit the site and purchase specific products, and predicting which products customers are most and least likely to buy in the future. The objective is to promote specific products to those customers most likely to buy them, and to determine which products a specific customer is most likely to purchase. This can help to improve the ratio of revenue to marketing costs.

In addition to these features, Web analytics may include tracking the click through and drilldown behavior of customers within the Web site, determining the sites from which customers most often arrive, and communicating with browsers to track and analyze online behavior. The results of Web analytics are provided in the form of tables, charts, and graphs.

Web analytics is very focused on the site, not the people who use the site. It's a bit like the old days in consumer-packaged goods, when brands focused on selling products rather than marketing to people. We must think about optimizing Web site performance from a much wider perspective.

An effective strategy for measuring and optimizing Web site performance has four key components:

· Good market intelligence


· Sophisticated visitor behavior analysis


· Excellent user profiling


· Effective site performance tracking

Good Market Intelligence. In a health care industry, every hospital knows whom to cater. For example, Asian Hospital can’t serve to the less fortunate people because of the hotel look, for sure it is expensive. With the good market intelligence, knowing the target market and where to target will increase web site performance.

Sophisticated Visitor Behavior Analysis. In order to attract customers, you should observe your visitors behavior analysis. For example, in the prices of the hospital rooms you observed that it is the last page that a visitor visits. Maybe because of the prices being so high that they cannot afford it.

Excellent User Profiling. To be able to attract more customers, user profiling can help increase web site performance. Just like on home TV shopping, those people watching it cannot really feel or experience the features of a product but still they can have customers. In a website, you need to help the clients to imagine your services in order to get them. Using excellent user profiling will help the customer imagine even by just reading your website.

Effective Site Performance Tracking. To be able to enhance and improve the website, the chosen web analytics software should be appropriate for your website. It should be effective enough to help distinguish where to improve the pages of your site.

MedNet Site Analytics (Website Traffic & SEO/SEM Reports) provide comprehensive reports with detailed graphs and information that tells you how often patients are visiting, what they're looking for and how they got to your website.

Among the information found in these reports is:

· SEO rankings per keyword/phrase across multiple search engines

· Keywords in the top 5/10/20/30 positions (pages 1-3)

· Positions gained/lost

· Overall SEO trend analysis

· Number of unique visitor sessions

· Referring search engines and other visitor sources

· Keywords/keyphrases matched

· Pages visited within your website / most requested pages

· Depth of visit (number of pages viewed per session)

· Visitors who have visited more than once

· Forms completed (number of requests for contact)

Additionally, a MedNet Visibility Specialist reviews the Site Analytics and will periodically discuss the objectives with the owner to fine-tune the efforts and ensure an optimum service plan for the practice.

The quantitative information that web analytics provides can be used to improve marketing messages and track effectiveness of marketing and advertising campaigns. You can test and fine-tune headlines, offers and promotions on your web site and track which ones resonate with your target market. Once you have an effective message, take it offline to all other marketing efforts.

If applied in the Makati Medical Center, web analytics will help them monitor customers and detractors. With this, they would be able to control easily the smaller problem to avoid making it to be a bigger problem. Web analytics can be used to detect where do their visitors mostly came from and which site is often visited. From this, improving Makati Medical Center’s website will attract more and more visitors everyday.

3rd Blog

Online Reputation.

Reputation is the opinion (more technically, a social evaluation) of the public toward a person, a group of people , or an organization. It is an important factor in many fields, such as education, business, online communities or social status.

Reputation can be considered as a component of the identity as defined by others.

Reputation is known to be a ubiquitous, spontaneous and highly efficient mechanism of social control in natural societies. It is a subject of study in social, management and technological science. Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organizations’, institutions and communities.

Online reputation is a factor in any online community where trust is important. It affects a pseudonym rather than a person.

Most of us don’t recognize Internet as one of the many tools to advertise, research, download, and many more. For most companies, they don’t realize that Internet is a great way to start a business or expand the company. Some companies still do the traditional way like giving away fliers; advertise on TV and newspapers, which nowadays is taking more time to be seen than the Internet.

People see a lot of good things about what Internet can do. Yes, it can help us communicate relatives and friends abroad. It also allows us to search for long lost friends, schoolwork and almost about everything. We can also go shopping online, watch movie online, sell online and a lot more. One trend that is growing fast on the Internet is blogging. A blog is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Blogging is an online journal that friends and relatives can read it. An example of this is blogger.com, where one can freely post anything without caring what other people will think. But what we don’t know is Internet can also destroy reputations. Your company’s reputation.

It is not what other people think of you that matter. It is what they can find out about you on the Web that will affect your ability to attract customers. Making a good reputation online is not easy. You need to ask people to write positive reactions towards your company. According to this website, there are tools that are faster and more efficient in finding out what the web has about your company’s reputation.

1. Monitoring Your Online Reputation. In order to do something about your reputation, you need to find out what people are saying about you. Google Alerts are actually e-mail updates based on specific query or topic. It’s very easy to set up, pretty reliable and free.

2. Manage Your Reputation. Once you know how to check your online reputation, you need to find the best way to managing it. Here are some great tools to help you with that:

Naymz.com is a great way to help you manage your reputation. You need to sign up, invite people and let them write reviews about you, your company, your products, services etc.

RapLeaf is another great website, where you can write reviews about other people and their companies. They will be invited to write about you in return.

Trackur was built by one of the biggest gurus of online reputation management, Andy Beal. You can set it up in minutes, and choose between individual, company and agency package.

3. Your online profiles are very important. You need to monitor and manage your online profiles. People can “Google” you anytime just to check if you are credible for the company or your company is not facing any legal matters. What we read on the Internet might change our mind. Here are some very good tools to help you manage your online profiles:

Comwat helps you “organize” your profiles, put them all together and in one place where you can find them easily. This way, the whole process of monitoring and managing your online profiles looks like a piece of cake!

SocialURL is another great way to organize your online profiles and connect them all with one simple URL.

So now you know some tools on how to check and be updated with your online reputation, next step is how to maintain it. Maintaining is difficult because there can be millions or even billions information about your company that you cannot control. Even the one liner bad information about your company can be really dirty for your company. Hence, according to Alexandra Levit here are five simple steps in managing your online reputation:

1. Listen and respond to online conversations before an issue reaches critical mass and damages your reputation. The best protection against negative comments and gripes is to build a positive reputation ahead of time.

2. In the event of a crisis, you or your leader must take responsibility in order to recover corporate reputation.

3. Explain your solution to the crisis/issue and then carry the solution into action.

4. Set up specific online destinations to solicit negative comments and deal with them separately. Bank of America set up a Twitter rep to deal with customer complaints.

5. To change how you appear on the Internet, push down the relevance of negative results and give the search engines positive new content.

Building a great online reputation will not only help your company attract more customers but will also help your company improve your products and services to have loyal customers. We may think that having bad issues about the company will destroy its reputation, but in the long run it will give positive effects in the company. Here are some positive effects:

· Improve customer satisfaction by gaining valuable insight into what your reputation is, you can be proactive in changing areas of your company or operations that are receiving negative publicity.

· Increase perceptions of brand by seeing what customers and potential customers are saying about your brand and the brand(s) of competitors, you can improve upon perception.

· Reduce internal costs by employing services, which save time and money can make or break a company. Online reputation management can achieve just that.

For more effects, visit Effects of Online Reputation.

Negative reputation can either be a good or a bad thing. It depends on how the company will take it. If they take it against them and just be affected by it, they will be having a hard time gaining what was broken. But if the company uses the negative reputation as a good thing, then it won’t get any worse instead they will improve. Be happy that when there are negative issues then your company is visible to people :) It also can be a good way of being famous!

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation

Second Blog

Data Mining on Healthcare

A topic as delicate as healthcare requires a mother load of data about patients, doctors, overhead cost, services provide and many more. The decision-making process becomes more and more difficult the less data that is present.

Like all data, it needs to be analyzed, and in the healthcare industry there are four types of data, patient-centric data which is directly related to patients, aggregate data which is based on performance and resource management data, transformed-based data for planning, clinical and management decision support, and comparative data for health services research and outcomes measurement. Thru the years much of this data is accumulated but information is very low, with the data warehousing of today and data analysis, the healthcare industry can use past data and turn it into better decision-making.

Data in its self has zero organizational value, but when turned into information has the ability to increase profits, control cost/expensed, speed-up services, perform technically sound procedures and maintain high quality of patient care. With the use of data mining; advanced algorithms, multiprocessor computers and massive databases, it is now possible to create patterns from data gathered, turning difficult decisions into a near resemblance of a Standard Operating Procedure. Example, if a doctor is trying to figure out what necessary steps are needed to cure a certain type of cancer attacking a particular part of the body, he would simply check previous data from the data mining, check the patterns that have appeared, age, status, blood pressure, body type, physique, height, weight, symptoms, drugs taken, blood type and the like of that patient and compare it with the other patients suffering from the same cancer, if there are 800 matches for all healthcare centers, than a decision is made quicker and more reliable, thus possibly saving a life, which is the target of a healthcare center.

With data mining, we are now able to use several techniques to further enhance the quality of service, techniques such as decision trees, neural networks, predictive modeling, fuzzy logic, rule induction and many more. These techniques, given data, can help determine survival rates, thus giving priority to patients that are in need of healthcare.

“IBM and the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, the formal name for the Rochester, Minn.-based nonprofit health care organization, announced that they were teaming up in early 2002. After initially putting the medical records of about 4.4 million patients treated at Mayo's three clinics into a DB2 database, IBM and Mayo have spent the past two years developing and testing a methodology for mining the data.”¹ More and more healthcare centers are aiming to be the best at delivering service to the clients.

In data mining it is equally important for the analyzer to have visual capabilities; the ability to spot patterns. Success of data mining tools relies on the ability of the analyzer to evaluate, analyze and detect patterns from the data.

As science of gathering data and mathematics of analyzing data, become more and more advanced, technology comes up with newer computers or software that help the analyzing of this data to a detail. “Mayo researchers will use Blue Gene to do "deep computing and deep science," including mathematical modeling and a simulation of gene structures to help predict the behavior of diseases”², it is truly amazing that the creative mind can turn prototypes into an actual useable product.

From a business standpoint, being able to predict trends or fads is always a plus with always one step ahead of the market and two steps ahead of the competition; as long as the data is well analyzed there is very minimal error. Errors can be made if even though the data was properly analyzed, given that there will always be unforeseen events, there will be slight errors, at the same time if even the errors were accounted for and there are scenarios prepared for these possible errors, than data mining for business will have close to zero errors because everything has been predicted.

In my personal opinion, data mining is definitely a growing technology. I would expect this to bloom in the future to be a “tool of the trade” for all healthcare centers as well as other industries. This technology can be used in various business by predicting the up and downs of the stock market, whether to build more building or less, to be able to understand the movement of several types of clients if passive or aggressive it would be easier to determine how to act, by clustering clients, decisions could be done by cluster instead of by person, this will control costs and maximize profits.

In conclusion, I believe data mining is an asset for the healthcare industry as well as other businesses interested in improving quality of service/products, speeding up service, improving business decision-making, and understanding the different classes of people/clients involved. If I had a long standing business, investing in data mining would be something I would definitely look into.

Reference:

1. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/95115/IBM_Mayo_Clinic_Take_Next_Data_Mining_Step1&2

first blog

IT on Health Care

Competitive advantages of IT (Information Technology) are used to travel information faster, via Internet or LAN. This process is probably the best option since the benefits out weigh the cost. As we move deeper in the Information technology era, we see it as a more convenient option to take. Being able to send numerous files filled with information to different locations, as quick as a click, without getting out of your chair, being able to conduct meetings with doctors capable of creating an antidote for the N1H1 virus, that is located in different countries via webcam. Services, facilities, and schedules of doctors available that are found on the website of the hospital/health center is easily accessible via Internet; the need to drive all the way to the hospital/health center is no longer valid at this IT era, as it costs money and time. Numerous websites can be found on the Internet that helps people cure or patch up minor incidents such as gashes or minor cuts.

A competitive advantage as opposed to the messenger boy running and delivering envelopes and letters to the different locations, and his job being to go up and down the elevator as well as looking for the person whom the letter is addressed to, will take time, also considering the possibility of errors in sending the right information to the wrong person, could be costly to the company. Minimizing this risks and delays is important to be able to attain the needs of the customer.

Health care, or the key word health demands speed and accuracy. The hospitals or health care centers must have data such as x-rays, medicine, doctors, nurses and other materials ready for the patients needs, otherwise be easily attainable. A lack in accuracy in the health department may lead the patient into a worse state or may even cause death. Damaging the sales and reputation of that health care center. This will lead to loss of income or worse, if the reason is the hospital refusing to switch to Information Technology as its source of gathering and dispatching of information.

As I see it, limitations of the Information Technology are that health care centers with this technology must continually update the technology as well as the security (firewalls and the like) to prevent viruses from corrupting all the information. As this has a lot to do with computers, black outs and the rebooting process could take about 2 to 3 minutes. Though it may seem short, when faced with a fatal situation, 2 to 3 minutes is a lot of time.

From my own business point of view, the most important is that the customer is satisfied within the margins of the business. Explaining this further, each business aims for customer satisfaction, in doing so leads to "hardcore" loyal customers that help the business since these customers tend to refer the business to their friends and family, which in turn (is served well) gains new customers. Great service almost most of the time leads to an increase in revenue, and revenue in exchange fuels business into adding faster, better quality service.

In my opinion, the Internet today is clearly the fastest, cheaper, better, acceptable option, and along with this option is Information Technology that relieve past problems pertaining to incidents, in the Health care industry, such as fatalities due to delay of information about the history of the patient, which may lead to mal-practice. These services benefit the customer as well as the industry. Faster more accurate information is moved across different hospitals and health centers with very minimal chance of missing information.

The downsides of viruses and black outs may seem to big of a risk since a single virus has the capability to evolve into a data-erasing virus and that it is expensive to continually update firewalls, and that black outs will cause the hospitals and health centers to purchase a big enough generator to power the entire hospital, at the same time fuel costs money and is expensive. Hospitals feed on customer satisfaction, all these expenses are basically paid for themselves since it is these expenses that bring in the customers and keep the customers, and these expenses are actually assets to the hospital and health center. Firewalls, LAN, Internet, Generators, Faster Wi-Fi, Great Doctors, and Helpful Nurses all contribute to customer satisfaction. A customer satisfied will keep refer and comeback, and that hospital or health center will gain a “hardcore” loyal customer and other potential customers that could be attracted by all these services the hospital or health care can provide.

Changes are one of the biggest, most difficult decisions to make especially for a long system that has been working for that business, in this case the health care industry because employees tend to ask the question “Why?” followed by the line “we are doing just fine”. The business must not be satisfied with “just fine” and must keep growing stronger, for this purpose the mission vision statement is made. In all businesses the goal is to be the best of its industry, or the leading supplier, manufacturer, basically number one in doing this, they keep up with growing technology as it is the comfortable positive attraction for the customer.

A hospital that I have seen that has one of the best services provided for patients is Asian Hospital. Though it is quite costly, patients are paying for both the excellent service as well as the pampering found in high-end hotels.

“The majority of hospitals that I see on Twitter use it as a way to distribute their latest news releases, or updates to their website. Maybe they are using tools such as Twitterfeed (which automates RSS feeds to populate a Twitter stream). These Twitter-feeds are designed exclusively as a way to drive interest to the hospital itself.”¹ Patients that follow there favorite or many hospitals and health centers can quickly see updates; the hospital could also twitter the doctor’s availability.

A brief history on the use of Information technology is that “in the 1970s, using the CD 3200 computer, he developed a hospital information system named HELP (Health Evaluation through Logical Processing), which collected extensive patient data. The system eventually grew to incorporate information from various parts of the hospital-laboratory results, pharmacy prescriptions, nursing care plans, surgery schedules, and accounting-thus creating one of the first integrated clinical systems. This integrative approach to organizing and storing patient information gave health professionals access to the totality of records in one system, which supported their decision making.”² Even during the 1970s Information Technology was already beneficial to the hospitals and health centers.

References:

1. http://hospitalonlinemarketingeducation.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-are-hospitals-using

2. http://medicineworld.org/cancer/lead/4-2006/use-of-information-technology-in-hospitals.html