At last month’s Health IT Marketing and PR Conference, I hosted a panel of customers to talk about what type of marketing tactics work for them. We had a broad range of people on the panel, so there was a wide variety of perspectives on how they discovered new innovations for their organization.
However, one thing stood out to me for one of the doctors that practiced in a relatively small 5 person group practice. He honestly didn’t have any great places to turn when he had a problem he needed to be solved. You got the feeling that he went to Google as much as he did anything else. Although, bewilderment was really his first response.
After some time he did come out with some common answers such as when he attends his association conferences and when he talks to his peers. No doubt doctors largely trust the opinions of their peers. However, there’s not nearly as much peer sharing as you might think. I remember another doctor I know in this physician’s practice which bought season tickets to the local college team’s basketball games. His idea was that he could go to the games with his peers. He couldn’t get any of them to go with him.
With these thoughts in mind, we’re chewing on how we at Healthcare Scene can help these practices out. One idea we have is to essentially create knowledge centers that will list all of the various companies and products that could help a small practice be more effective and efficient. We did this with EMR and EHR vendors in the past as many were looking for that type of list. We’re asking ourselves if we can do the same for other categories of software and services that could help doctors be more effective at what they do.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this idea and any other ways we can help doctors discover new innovations. It’s a challenging idea since it isn’t like there’s one healthcare IT market for small practices. The needs vary by specialty, group size, location, etc etc etc. However, we’ll do our best. Plus, we’ll do like we always do and iteratively improve the lists over time.
One other idea I’m hoping to execute is to do as many origin stories for the products we list as possible. I think it’s extremely powerful to know the origin of a company and how they ended up with the solution they offer. Did they start this way? Did they acquire a company to get into the business? Did they start with another product and then pivot to what they’re doing today when they saw the opportunity? Knowing this information is powerful.
Hopefully in the future we can point to a vast library of knowledge centers that can better help a practice know about companies that can help them work more effectively and efficiently.