DoctorBase Insight for Doctors on Marketing Automation in Healthcare | Doctor Referral Software

Investors Like Facebook

Mike Haverhals — Sat, 19 May 2012 02:11:52 +0000

It finally happened. Facebook, the social-networking website started in 2005 by the son of a dentist, made their debut as a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq this Friday. After setting a new record in volume of shares sold (567 million), their stock closed at $38.23 – only slightly above the initial price of $38. At the end of the day, Facebook raised $16B and now has a market value of around $104B. This gives Facebook the largest tech IPO in history and flat out the 3rd largest IPO ever.

What’s the first thing Facebook is going to do with that freshly minted $16B? Mobile. All signs have been pointing to mobile being top on Facebook’s to-do list from their $1B purchase of Instagram last month to fact that over half of their 900M+ users now access the site through mobile devices. In the lead up to the IPO, an amendment to their filing addressed the mobile shift happening with their user base and their current inability to monetize this trend. This led founder Mark Zuckerberg to openly state that mobile is now the company’s top priority.

If you thought the IPO-madness of “Facebook Friday” was exciting, just wait until you see what kind of innovation $16B will put on a smartphone.

Want more patients from Facebook? Claim your free DoctorBase profile and learn how the Panda allows patients to request appointments from within Facebook’s mobile app at:

http://doctor.DoctorBase.com/claim

Web Marketing For Doctors Explained

Mike Haverhals — Fri, 11 May 2012 22:41:06 +0000

We know that using the web to promote your practice can be a bit overwhelming with all the googling, facebooking, tweeting, pinning, and everything else. So, we’ve created a handy little chart to give you a quick synopsis of 5 of the more important online strategies. Click on the image to view full-size…

Want us to do all of this for you? Claim your free DoctorBase profile and learn how the Panda takes care of everything from word-of-mouth referrals on Facebook to mobile-ready websites for iPhones and Droids at:

http://doctor.DoctorBase.com/claim

Facebook Aiming for $96B Valuation

Mike Haverhals — Sat, 05 May 2012 07:14:29 +0000

It’s been a good year for Facebook and it’s about to get better. The largest social network on the web eclipsed 900 million users earlier this year and recently purchased Instagram for a cool $1B. However, that number is going to be dwarfed this month when Facebook makes it’s initial public offering on the Nasdaq.

Facebook execs are currently strumming up investor support for their IPO which will be offered to the public at around $28-$35 a share. This would give Facebook a market valuation of around $96B – not bad for a company founded in 2004 by the son of a Dentist. The $13B+ that Facebook hopes to raise will be the largest IPO ever for an Internet company, far exceeding the $1.9B Google raised with their own IPO back in 2004. But, what are they going to do with all that money?

Aside from hiring more engineers away from Google and likely a few more Instagram-like acquisitions, expect them to continue to expand the mobile side of their business. They already make over $3B a year from advertising to their users, but none of that comes from mobile which is their fastest growing segment of users. And, with a freshly minted $13B in their pockets, they should be able to do some pretty amazing things.

Want more patients from Facebook? Claim your free DoctorBase profile and learn how the Panda allows patients to request appointments from within Facebook’s mobile app at:

http://doctor.DoctorBase.com/claim

Intuit Acquires Demandforce

Mike Haverhals — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 22:22:49 +0000

Intuit, the makers of financial software Quicken & TurboTax, announced this week that they would be acquiring small and medium-sized business marketing company Demandforce. Many doctors out there are familiar with Demandforce’s services as they started in the healthcare space several years ago providing appointment reminders to private practices.

In recent years, they’ve branched out to other specialties such as veterinarians, auto mechanics, and hair salons. This approach has proven profitable to them, as evidenced by the $424M Intuit decided to pay for the company. But, the most interesting thing about the acquisition isn’t the price tag, it’s the fact that they’ll be a part of Intuit’s Small Business Group. This is intriguing because Intuit has it’s own healthcare division.

Usually, when a company is absorbed into a larger organization, the largest concern is with how increased bureaucracy often slows down the development of new features, causes (sometimes for the better) a change in practices, and can create issues with how to adequately support existing customers. But, with Intuit’s decision not to bring Demandforce into their healthcare group, additional questions are raised as to how Demandforce’s acquisition will effect their focus on medical & dental practices. Will there still be features that are patient-specific? Or, will it begin to resemble cookie-cutter services without the doctor’s specific needs in mind? Time will tell what effect this acquisition will have on private practices. We just hope that it doesn’t further marginalize doctors and how you provide for your patients.

Now for the disclaimer… With all congratulations to Rick, Sam, and the rest of their team, we readily admit to having a vested interest in this topic and that we are incredibly biased in our belief that your practice is more than just another business. It’s why we didn’t name our company BusinessBase. That being said, we don’t want you to simply take our incredibly biased word for it. We want to prove it to you.

Claim your free profile on DoctorBase and we’ll also give you our entire Panda software suite free for 30 days – unlimited patient messaging & personalized marketing support for your practice at no charge. If you like it, stick around for as long as you’d like on a month-to-month basis – no contracts. If you don’t, cancel anytime…the Panda will still love you!

Claim your free DoctorBase profile and get the whole Panda for free at:

http://doctor.DoctorBase.com/claim

Teamwork Through Texting

Mike Haverhals — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 06:25:32 +0000

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal discussed how doctors are using text messaging to collaborate with patients on their health. In early trials, patients received regular texts from their doctors asking about current conditions. Patient responses were then collected and tracked over a period of time to determine the effect of changes to treatments.

We’ve extolled the value of texting your patients for some time now. Primarily, we’ve noted the operational benefits of using text messages to remind patients of upcoming appointments in order to reduce no-show rates. Along the way, we’ve also noticed a trend of practices starting to shift to using text messages as the primary form of communication with their patients – using it for not only appointment reminders, but also answer questions in real time throughout the workday.

While there are also many new devices being introduced into the market to collect patient data, text messages are proving to be an even easier means by which to accomplish the same thing. Plus, they don’t require any additional purchases or setup and the collaborative contact also serves to increase patient satisfaction – a true win-win situation for doctor and patient.

Want to be able to text your patients? Claim your free DoctorBase profile and learn how the Panda enables you to text patients from your computer in a HIPAA compliant manner at:

http://doctor.DoctorBase.com/claim

Trivia Night to Fight Parkinson’s

Mike Haverhals — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 17:45:09 +0000

What happens when you take a bunch of computer geeks and put their nerdy brains in a trivia contest? Find out first hand by joining us at Maggie McGarry’s (1353 Grant Ave, San Francisco, CA) this next Tuesday, April 24th at 7p for a trivia night to benefit the Michael J. Fox Foundation and their work to find a cure for Parkinson’s disease. Bring your own giant brain out to meet us in person and support the cause by purchasing your tickets here. Or, if your smartness can’t make it here to San Francisco, you can also donate directly to the fundraiser here - we know Team Fox will appreciate the support!

Instacash

Mike Haverhals — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 22:16:59 +0000

This past week, Facebook acquired Instagram – the company behind the popular free photo app for smartphones. What makes this a newsworthy acquisition is the fact that Facebook paid a cool $1B (yup, billion w/ a ‘B’) for Instagram. That’s $1B dollars for a company that created an app 2 years ago that allowed users to apply filter effects to camera phone photos and then share these photos with their friends. However, there’s more to it than that…

We should first point out that Instagram does have over 30 million users sharing photos with each other, making it an up-and-coming social network that was sure to catch Facebook’s eye. It’s also true that images have become an increasingly important space on the web – just look at the meteoric rise of Pinterest and the potential they’ve given doctors to create a social before-and-after gallery. Still, there’s another reason why Instagram is so valuable to Facebook – mobile.

We’ve commented ad nauseum for the past year on the growing importance of mobile for your practice. We’ve made these comments based on facts like these: over half of Facebook’s 800M+ users access the site via a mobile device. But, not unlike many practices out there, Facebook hasn’t done as much as they could have to capitalize on their mobile user base. (They didn’t even have an official iPad app until late last year!) Instagram, on the other hand, is purely a mobile company. Until the release of their Android app this month, Instagram was only available on the iPhone. And, you still can’t even create an account online – it’s all done through their mobile app.

By paying a hefty sum for Instagram this past week, Facebook not only acquired a social network of image creators, they also made a giant leap forward into becoming the leader in the mobile space. And, as more patients access the web from mobile devices, it will become just as important for your practice to follow in Facebook’s steps to increase your mobile presence.

Want a mobile website? Claim your free DoctorBase profile and have the Panda give you a complimentary mobile website…for $1B less than what Facebook paid!

http://doctor.DoctorBase.com/claim

Pinterest For Your Practice

Mike Haverhals — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 04:42:37 +0000

If you haven’t heard of Pinterest yet, you’ve been missing out on one of the biggest online stories of the past year. It has quickly become the fastest growing social network on the web, reaching 10M users faster than any other website in history. And, it’s now the 3rd largest social networking website behind only Facebook and Twitter. But, what is it?

Pinterest, quite simply, is a bulletin board where you can ‘pin’ pictures of the things you’re interested in. It’s essentially a social bookmarking website that allows you to visually share the things you find online with your friends. It has also become quite the referral engine as it now creates more referral traffic than Twitter. (Apparently a picture is also worth more than 140 characters?)

Interestingly, along with a lot of style & design content, one the primary sectors where Pinterest creates referrals is in the health and wellness space. Pinterest’s user base is overwhelmingly female, and they’re sharing everything from healthy recipes to fitness articles. And, for those of you with practices in the American heartland, it’s also worth noting that many of these users reside in the Midwest.

So, what does this mean for your practice? One simple way to get your feet wet with Pinterest is to use it as your new before-and-after portfolio. It gives you a simple way to share your work with prospective patients. But, since Pinterest is still invite-only, you’ll need to find somebody who’s already using the site to hook you up.

Want to check out Pinterest for your own practice? We have a limited number of invitations that we’ll give to the first doctors who claim their free DoctorBase profile at:

http://doctor.DoctorBase.com/claim

Time for Timeline

Mike Haverhals — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 19:36:40 +0000

Facebook began the mandatory rollout of their new timeline format across all business pages on Friday. As we’ve noted before, this is not an optional layout for your practice’s page – so you need to make sure there’s nothing that needs to be revised or fixed not that it has been implemented. While your profile picture will remain the same, the layout and how patients interact with the rest of your page have undergone some major changes. Here are a few highlights:

Cover Photo
In addition to your existing profile picture, you can select a larger cover photo that will now dominate the top of your page.

Apps
The basic links to your photo album, likes, & info can still be viewed, although in a more uniform & prominent display. Plus, you can now add custom applications to the top of your page.

Stories
Along with the new timeline layout and it’s larger stories, you’ll be able to customize how the stories appear by pinning them to the top of the timeline, starring them, or even hiding them from the public’s eyes.

Milestones
In addition to stories, you can also add milestones to your timeline to share important events in the history of you practice.

Activities
We’ve commented on Facebook’s push to make everything more actively social before. They now show exactly how patients interact with your page by publicly displaying metrics on those interactions.

Admin Panel
A new administration panel is available to help you manage your page. You can use it to view statistics, social insights, and a log of your own activity as you build and customize your page.

If you’d like more detailed info, you can check out Facebook’s own guide available for download here: Facebook Pages Guide (PDF). And, you’re logged into Facebook, feel free to check out our own Facebook page to see how we’ve implemented these changes here: DoctorBase’s page. Of course, we’re a bit biased about it…but let us know if you like what we’ve done with it by clicking the ‘Like’ button!

Want to learn more about using Facebook pages to increase your new patient referrals? Claim your free DoctorBase profile to learn how the Panda connects you to the largest patient referral network on Facebook at:

http://doctor.DoctorBase.com/claim

Mobile Traffic to Doctor Profiles Increases Over 400%

Mike Haverhals — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 00:18:35 +0000

A recent report from comScore (available here) noted a 134% increase in mobile activities related to health over the past year. This makes health far and away the fastest growing mobile space ahead of the 2nd fastest growing segment of online retail, which only showed an 87% increase in mobile activity.

We concur. You may have noticed us talking about mobile quite a bit here on the DoctorBlog, and for good reason. Mobile traffic to our doctors’ profiles on DoctorBase.com has increased over 400% in the past year. And, although Droid devices have taken the largest share of the mobile space, more of the increase in traffic to our doctors’ profiles has come from ‘iDevices’ like the iPhone & iPad.

Unfortunately, this causes a major issue for most practices as that fancy, animated website you paid thousands of dollars for a couple years ago was built with Flash…and Flash doesn’t work on iPhones or iPads. What results is a broken experience for your patients that often leaves them without so much as the information needed to contact you.

These enhanced sites that may look good on a 24″ monitor also tend to be overbuilt for mobile devices and connections. This can cause badly scaled content, broken formatting, and longer load times. These first two issues simply make your practice look bad, and the last one is an even bigger issue because most patients won’t wait longer than 5 seconds for a site to load before they abandon the website to go look somewhere else.

While a decked out website may look good on a computer, your patients are increasingly visiting your site from a mobile device that isn’t displaying your website correctly, if at all. What results is your turning away patients and missing out on the fastest growing group of patients that are searching for you online. You don’t have to entirely abandon your existing website, but please ensure that you have mobile alternative in place before you turn away any more patients.

Want to make your existing website mobile? Claim your free DoctorBase profile and learn how the Panda makes your current website compatible with iPhones and Droids at:

http://doctor.DoctorBase.com/claim