If you've been wondering about the reduction in posting frequency here at Health Management Rx, it's because I'm blogging away at neXthealth, where a hive of healthcare collaborators is connecting innovators all over the world to figure out "what's next."
Last night, courtesy of Marc Fonteijn at 31Volts, we launched at MOMO 6 - accompanying Doc Searls on the event backchannel as he waxed philosophical about healthcare as a conversation and creating individual terms of service.
Consider this your open invitation.
Please - join us. Sparking change in health and wellness policy takes a global village. More about nexthealth in short order...
NOTE: Today's entry crossposted -please visit nexthealth.nl.
One thing I’ve learned as a blogger advocating for global healthcare innovation - you have to step outside the cushy comfort zone of safe, boring healthcare conferences to find tech best practices.
WAY outside the comfort zone.
Outside my comfort zone feels a bit like sitting in a room full of Dutch tech people so cutting edge it’s slightly painful, watching the first half of Mobile Monday 6 (MOMO), in Dutch. Which I don’t speak.
Luckily, tech-talk is universal.
HIT’s major weakness is that designers, innovators, and executives aren’t paying intimate attention to what’s going on in the world of mobile tech development.
Sure, we talk about being addicted to our Crackberries the latest Apple device, and what laptop we’ll purchase next, but the experience of using high tech mobile and electronic devices is largely divorced from healthcare strategic communications planning. Some of us are working on harnessing gaming and web-based worlds like Second Life and wrestling them into applicability for the healthcare sector. Yay, us. The problem is that resurfacing gaming tech and bending it to health and wellness utility (a la Wiihabiliation) is just not enough.
As a result, we always seem to be several steps behind. Strike that - it’s an almost criminally gross understatement. In HIT, we always seem to be several evolutionary stages behind. And even worse, some so-called HIT firms still don’t get it.
We’re stuck on developing a semi-decent PHR while here in Amsterdam, Paul Brackel just finished up talking about 3G mobile applications.
We can do so much with our mobile phones - why oh why aren’t healthcare companies and hospitals developing mobile applications NOW?
Two days ago on Twitter I posted several articles detailing the coming exodus from computer-based apps to cloud computing, powered by and accessible through an array of mobile devices.
At some point, our mobile devices will largely replace our computers (and our televisions). Laptops will go the way of the desktop, and we’ll email, text, buy, sell, and live the connected life via sleeker, smarter PDAs.
But if healthcare policy makers and entrepreneurs acknowledge this migration to mobile tech, they’ll have to acknowledge we are, after all, a consumer-directed, patient-centric industry.
Guitar hero healthcare and millenial patients are on the way, make no mistake. And we want our healthcare to move like we do, in an interconnected, web-based mobile world.
So how might hospitals and existing healthcare organizations reach out to patients, physicians, and other ‘next gen’ consumer segments using mobile technologies developed for the consumer industry?
It’s easier than you might think.
Below I’ll detail some examples based on demos and talks presented at Mobile Monday Amsterdam 6.
For those in Holland, MOMO is a must attend tech event. I strongly suggest every member of the healthcare sector keeping up with “what’s next” here at Nexthealth put MOMO on your calendars (MOMO 7: September 1st).
To kick things off, here’s a best practice example of mobile marketing for appointment setting: A company named Mobillion sent out kidnap style letters with a marketing code to text on mobile phones. They sent 1,333 pieces, which yielded a 25% response rate. 20 appointments were scheduled.
And best practices on mobile outreach for a new product line from Samsung: “How to introduce a cutting edge new mobile phone - let your audience do it for you.”
Samsung released phones into the wild on Queens Day - photos uploaded by revelers using the new phone were shown on livestream video billboards placed in Rembrandt Square. Samsung’s approach is notable because the company used a combination of channels simultaneously: 1. live event (Holland’s biggest party - go to where your target group is) 2. social media (streamed videos live on Holland’s largest social media site, Hives, which picked up over 4M viewers, almost crashing the server) 3. billboards (next gen TV/video).
Lesson for healthcare orgs: 1. Go to where your audience lives. breathes. shops. eats. parties. talks. When you want to launch a new service line, “let your audience do it for you.”
If you don’t KNOW your target audience, though, you’ll be lost.
And if you don’t THINK of consumers as your ‘target audience,’ you may as well pack it in and go home- you’re already lost.
Next up: Daem Interactive presents (pronounced “dime” - a firm with a focus on image recognition for mobile phones, based in Barcelona). Their awesome new product allows you to take a photo of a logo/brand on your mobile phone. It uses server based image recognition, and photos sent via SMS (example shown = someone taking photo of water bottle with your mobile phone).
Here’s where venturing outside your comfort zone starts to feel, well, comfy: This is better than a TechCrunch breaking news bulletin, and here we are, a row of geeky healthcare bloggers, right in the thick of things.
Daem gives an example of campaign in Italy w/Vodafone - they put red sKattami! magnets and stickers all over the city. The badgges had a message telling users to take a photo of themselves with the logo. Once you sent it in via SMS, you got 5E off your mobile bill, and were entered into a drawing to win a holiday to Ibiza. According to Daem, the campaign worked because “people like to show themselves - it was interesting how they chose to show the logo” (laughter from the crowd).
So hospitals - how do your campaigns let patients ’show themselves?’ Push beyond the traditional tightly structured, highly regulated testimonial format. Let patients loose!
Now Daem presents “Skuair” - next gen image recognition. Daeminteractive.com is launching this in September. They showed a video demo - it takes one click for partnered organizations (example, Coke) to receive a wriggling live prospect via their mobile phone. You take a photo of a barcode type image, the system recognizes it, and a link to information is embedded in the barcode via wifi or other access linkup. Awesome stuff. We’ll hear a lot more about this company soon, I have no doubt.
Next up is speaker Ben van der Burg, a great guy with crazy hair and a frenetic energy who talks about “Creating a New World” in advertising - Slide 1: What will you TELL them? Ben, I’ll tell you, we want you to come help us create a new world in healthcare!
Overall takeaway from Ben: The world is changing. Get over it. Empires - the age of old , slow-moving empires is over, the age of multigenerated, crowd sourced, Creative Commons, Peer to Peer, new empires has begun. What kind of empire are you building? What kind of empire are you spending time, energy, and money to maintain?
Now we’re taking a brief break for one of the event sponsors to take the stage - Vondafone is a sponsor of MOMO 6. For healthcare and HIT entrepreneurs - forget ChangeNow4Health’s pithy 10k - go for the 100M Euro prize offered by Vodafone’s new Mobile Clicks contest!
After fingerfood and coffee (bedankte Vodafone), the bloggers crack laptops once again. Takeaway from the beginning of segment 2, in English: We are a “we” culture - give people what they want and they will play with you…”mobile is a push channel” - Blyk is a free mobile service, funded by targeted ads, for 16-24 year olds in the UK…the goal was 100,000 users in UK in the first year - they’ve reached it already.
From the business development end, Blyk also clinched 100 brand partnerships, goal is 200 by end of year. NOTES: Not surprising they have this level of advertising partnership, everyone WANTS this demographic badly. What demographic does your healthcare organization ‘want’ badly? What service lines are you trying to grow?
The next speaker is Russell Buckley - “AdMob, Mobhappy - Mobile Advertising Facts & Figures”…he’s a founding member of the German branch of Mobile Monday. AdMob started in 2006, went to find people who had mobile web pages, recruited them to join network, and sell mobile advertising via a revenue sharing model.
As Russell says, one of the things which happens when you have a mobile website, is that it happens pretty much all over the world (160 countries for AdMob). Global page views = 2.6 BILLION per month. Lesson for healthcare entrepreneurs. Go mobile - this will help you go global. AdMob provides mobile ad solutions by partnering with over 4500 + mobile sites.
Russell is also Chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association. “I’m very anxious to promote cause of mobile marketing generally.” His prediction? More than 5% of total 5B advertising market worldwide will ‘go mobile’ by 2015 (Goal!) “We’re at the beginning of a boom that is going to dwarf the internet boom that we first saw 10 years ago.”
Russell put some interesting specs up on the big screen. Ad requests by geography: US over 1,347,189,080, nearly 47 percent of requests, but only 0.8% of next share change. Next in line with most requests: India, followed by UK, South Africa, and Indonesia.
So - again, what does this mean for hospitals and healthcare orgs in the US? YOU MUST DEVELOP a MOBILE MARKETING PLATFORM. NOW.
In terms of requests by provider, Nokia is first, with 26.9 percent. Then Motorola, with just over 20%. So hospital execs - who is a logical partner to approach when developing mobile apps? Nokia!
50% of handsets used by AdMob support streaming video. “Use Cases - determine which ads perform best and lead to conversations (which is great, because part of Nexthealth’s mission is reshaping healthcare delivery as a conversation, rather than a dictation).” Russell hammers home the point that it is these conversations which help you “understand customers’ usage of your mobile landing page.”
Another AdMob truism relevant for healthcare strategy - everyone wants to know “What happens after the click?” Advertisers and marketers tend to think the click is the end game, the final desired result. Really this is just the first step in the conversation, and advertisers need to be thinking about how to keep people ‘talking.’
When first implementing mobile communications campaigns, hospitals especially may be skeptical of potential ROI. But Russell blows this worry out of the water with an Adidas Case Study. For Adidas, AdMob delivered a very simple campaign, promoting Adidas’ existing football channel. Adidas gave them 4% of total ad budget for the project, and AdMob generated 40% of the traffic.
In a Coca Cola Case Study - 1in 3 click-through users actually visited the site more than once, which means this is a very engaged audience.
Let’s say you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid by now and are ready to break into the web-based marketplace. Now you have to realize there’s a difference the between mobile advertising marketplace and the internet advertising marketplace, what will you do in the future? Russell predicts the obile web will overtake the fixed web within a five year period, so hospitals moving quickly will be in a very good position.
Next up, author Chetan Sharma, who tells us we should be paying more attention to alternate devices, readers, androids, Amazon’s Kindle, gaming tech, GPS, etc., and that we should be developing more apps within space that has “nothing to do with voice or data interaction.”
The crowd grows restless. We’re all waiting for the rockstar closing keynote, to be delivered by Doc Searls. Doc takes the stage to thunderous applause, wearing a Hawaian shirt. Being one of only 2 people in the room who haven’t yet read The Cluetrain Manifesto, I was thrilled to be given a lesson on VRM from Doc himself.
Doc’s core thesis: “A free range customer is more valuable than a captive one.” “We’ve come to think a free market is your choice of silo” - kind of like “slaves choose your captors.” Wow. Strong language, and Doc provides a great lesson on how to capture the audience’s rapt attention in seconds.
According to Doc, if you want mobile-anything - you need a “generative” platform…”generativity happens when the platform is the opposite of a silo. It runs on anything and supports anything. PCs are generative.”
The net is generative as well. The ideal PHR has to be generative. “It’s made so you can do any darn thing you want with it.”
Next Doc quotes Toffler’s “The Third Wave,” and defines how we’re still suffering from split personality disorder- the industrial age split apart production and consumption. “In so doing it drove a giant invisible wedge into our economies and our psyches” Doc makes the point that who we are at work still wants to manage who we are at home.
We see it in our CRM systems (customer relationship management).
“The cool thing is that humans are generative” - CRM management is not about technically about managing relationships.
Doc says the human being is not a platform - yet - but we could be - people are perfectly positioned to run on whatever they want. Lessons for HIT startups - let us run your apps on whatever we want. I don’t care what that costs you in R and D, development, testing, and all night coma inducing coding sessions. Get it right the first time - help us be generative, free-range humans.
In other words, “I should be able to issue a “personal RFP” on the fly.” We should be able to define our own terms of service as consumers, as patients. What do we want and need from the system? How do we communicate that to system ‘herders?’
And now, for those of you not in the live audience - drumroll please…
Nexthealth.nl proudly launches in front of 400 hyper-connected, heavy-hitting innovators - the backchannel shows Nexthealth, accompanying Doc’s assertion that we should be able to manage our relationships with vendors in healthcare.
And not only manage relationships, manage them through the devices and communications channels of our choice, which, my friends, will be increasingly mobile, especially if MOMO, 31Volts, Nexthealth.nl, and e-patients have anything to say about it.
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