Why Hospitals Need Content Management to Maximize Patient Experience

More than a few marketing-savvy hospitals have grown from a simplistic and static Web presence to a dynamic, multi-layered Internet encounter with their many audiences and various messages.

More than a few marketing-savvy hospitals have grown from a simplistic and static Web presence to a dynamic, multi-layered Internet encounter with their many audiences and various messages.

It’s getting tougher all the time to constantly juggle the competing digital demands, messages and methods. And “constrained resources” can’t be allowed to chisel away at service quality or patient satisfaction.

Fortunately, hospital administrators and communications professionals have embraced content marketing as a cornerstone strategy that effectively reaches and motivates prospective patients, patients, family, friends, donors and the community.

But one of the main challenges is to efficiently manage the countless moving parts, and evolve from elementary Website “publishing” to cost-effective “experience support”—support that:

• closely integrates and manages,
• effectively engages customers, and
• accurately measures performance.

In short, hospital content management has grown dramatically, and many facilities now need to move to an enterprise level solution. If web content management (WCM) software isn’t in your immediate plans, it likely will be soon. For marketing-smart hospitals, the no-nonsense reasons include maximizing “digital customer experience,” patient satisfaction…and it makes good (cost effective) business sense.

You’ll find a good overview in the Forrester Research publication, Web Content Management For Digital Customer Experience. They used a 100-criteria evaluation for 10 of the most significant WCM providers—Adobe, Acquia, Ektron, HP Autonomy, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle, SDL, and Sitecore.

This subject can quickly become a bit technical, but Forrester offers these key takeaways:

Plain Web publishing isn’t enough in the era of digital experience. In our words, a static site is a thing of the past. Providing good quality, timely and engaging content is the beginning. Management and marketing capabilities call for website and content analytics, multichannel delivery and personalized experiences.

Integration remains the cornerstone of (most) successful Web content management. Today’s customers—patients and other audience groups—desire connection, conversation and interaction. Successful engagement requires optimum use of various digital channels to acquire new patients, capture reader insight and deliver personalized content.

Adobe leads due to breadth of functionality, market momentum and resources. Adobe is one of many fine providers and products available…and they may, or may not, be an ideal fit for every situation. But Forrester makes the case that Adobe’s platform provides solid user tools to manage experiences across multiple channels and devices (including mobile).

As a brief disclosure, we have no vested interest in Adobe. Our objective here is to open the door to web content management software for hospitals that need to move up to the next level and maximize patient experience.