Healthcare is a topic that generates huge online search volumes; just about everyone has Googled a symptom or researched a diagnosis on a medical website. According to Pew, 80 percent of people look to search engines first when seeking health information.
This article originally appeared on MediaPost.
Any woman who’s tried to learn how much a surgery, test or procedure will cost for herself or a family member knows it’s almost impossible to shop for healthcare in America on price and quality. Increased regulation has fallen short of its promise to make it easier to determine what consumers pay. But efforts continue: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently changed the rules about how hospitals must share pricing information. Starting January 1, 2019, hospitals will be required to publish their standard charges on the internet.
Six paths to authentic content and increased engagement
Women are not only the primary decision-makers for healthcare; they’re also more active on social media. Engaging women where they spend their time is crucial to your marketing success. Here are six recommendations for creating a unique and relevant voice on social channels.
Checklists can break down complexity, reduce risk and improve connections with female consumers.
I recently listened to a “Hidden Brain” episode about the power checklists have to save lives in hospital settings. By implementing a surgical checklist process, mortality rates can be reduced by as much as 47 percent. They’ve also been shown to reduce gender bias in hospitals, leading to better outcomes for women.
These staggering and fascinating statistics got me thinking about the value of transforming complexity into simplicity to eliminate failure points. There’s a plethora of evidence about how checklists can help reduce human errors in complex fields like medicine and aviation. Could they help hospital marketers do a better job at the complex task of connecting with women? Just as healthcare has become more complex over time and medical professionals have experienced increasing pressure to have ever-greater levels of expertise, a similar shift has happened in marketing healthcare — especially to women.