Northside is a three hospital system with 26 outpatient facilities. It is primarily known for its maternity services and it’s the largest in the nation with 18,000 births. Northside has been around since 1970 and we are one of the newer healthcare systems compared to others in the Atlanta market.

I’m fairly new to the healthcare industry.  I have only been in this industry the past three to three and a half years. I have been in marketing for the past 28 years and started out in the ad agency side in a variety of different industries.  I just finished up with industrial international manufacturing when I got an interview with Northside and thought I would switch industries.

I am not a native of Atlanta (I came from Buffalo, NY) so I really didn’t have much of an introduction , however I had heard wonderful things about Northside. The HR person that talked with me was so warm and personable that I thought, I will just go in for the interview, and I did want to switch markets. I was traveling overseas and 9/11 hit and I really wanted to switch to something else. It is such a nurturing industry, so it’s nice to be able to make a difference in a marketing way in this type of industry versus an industrial setting. I guess that’s why I switched.

I think for a Healthcare web site, you’ve got two directions - you can have it full of content about your product and services with contact information, and the action would be to either call a number or to talk with your physician. Or you can streamline it toward education. Our web site was just being developed when I started.  I am not a webmaster by any stretch of the imagination, I am a web minor in my best days but I had just finished launching a website in 5 different languages.  And it was one that had a variety of products. So I came in with a different view point. We thought, what type of experience is the visitor going to have when they are at the web site? What are they looking for? Now patients are searching for a variety of information, they are looking for medical content, they are looking to educate themselves or a loved one.  Our primary target market is really women. Women are the gatherers of information and they make a lot of the healthcare decisions, whether it is for their immediate family or even for their parents. So looking at our site and knowing our limited resources (I don’t have a dedicated web team), I asked, how can I add content? How can I enrich what we have to make it a useful tool for patients, for the consumer, and community?  What can I do to enrich their experience? And that is when I started looking for web content tools. I started looking beyond the Atlanta market, nationally. Who are other institutions, whether it is a University setting, a Healthcare System that is well respected?  What is interesting with that is you also have to get a good feel for what your brand is. Our brand is maternity. People don’t know we perform more surgeries than any other hospital in Atlanta. They don’t know that our cancer program diagnoses more new cases of cancer than any other Healthcare system or hospital. So it is also a branding issue - how can we add content where the patients, the visitor, can use this for their own healthcare decisions then also take ownership while building our brand? And that was an important facet of why I decided to add medical content to the site. You can create medical content. You can have a great agency and you can start looking at different topics.  But the minute you do, it becomes apparent that it is so vast. It’s not like you have 5 pieces of equipment that have multiple uses; it’s pretty much static. Healthcare covers so many topics, so many issues, so many procedures, so many surgeries. You want to provide content without getting too much of a skew when you are creating it yourself to reflect only the product lines that you are trying to promote. I want to provide information across the medical spectrum, whether we are the best at it or not. So that is why I started looking into what type of options I have.

There really were not a lot of people involved. It was one of those things where marketing is an island in the healthcare system. Everybody is clinical, whether they are on the maternity floor, the oncology floor, or the surgery floor. When you are in marketing you are non-clinical, so it’s a different element. I had to look at this content by validating who uses it, how is it created, what type of updates are done.. That’s what impressed me the most with A.D.A.M. - very well respected Hospitals and Universities use your content, and looking at how often it’s updated is important. As I said, I can hire a huge staff to create medical web content, but I couldn’t touch the volumes that you provide. I could never afford to have a staff to update it. Looking at your staff and understanding that they have a medical background is what the difference is.

Bob Anderson (Sales Representative), really made my introduction to A.D.A.M. easy. I look at the vendors I work with not as vendors but an extension of my department. I look at them as a team.  I can’t possibly know everything about printing, everything about media buying, everything about web development. You are kidding yourself as a marketing professional to think that you can know and be current in everything. So I just called and started talking with Bob. I called a couple of other companies. And in that instant conversation I felt he was very candid, very honest. I liked the way he answered my questions. He gave me room to breath, to make decisions. He gave me additional websites of other hospitals to look at. What is interesting, is that when I started looking on my own you don’t necessarily know that it is all A.D.A.M. content because they have integrated into their site and they have made it their own, then you don’t necessarily have that template to understand that this is A.D.A.M. content. And that is what I would like to do in 2009-2010, I would love to integrate it into my site to be able to increase my link, to be able to take the content and incorporate it in different areas and have it just add to my search engine optimization even more so. Bob helped me understand that better.

About 2 or 2-1/2 years.

I have the Health Illustrated Encyclopedia, Pregnancy Center, Surgeries and Procedures and the QuickSheets.

Nothing. It’s amazing with all the marketing mediums you have how the internet has just blown the doors off the way you reach the consumer. The use of the internet to gain information - right now we have so many generations that we tap into, those that are in their 20’s and 30’s that  are used to the internet for gaining access to endless information, who are using cell phones and have a constant daily interaction with the outside world in a way. Versus those that are in their 40’s and 50’s that didn’t go through school with the internet, who didn’t have it as a natural tool to gain information before.  Then to more of the senior citizens, in their 60’s, 70’s and 80’s where it is something that is very foreign, where if they are using it now they really pursued learning about the internet and creating an email address. So it is just interesting markets at the generations that you have to target.

The four tools that we have each do something different for us. Here we are the largest maternity hospital in the United States and our site wasn’t rich in maternity information. But up until the last five to ten years it wasn’t something that was naturally provided. You went to your OB and you gained all of your information from them on your visits. And the generation now that are in their 20s & 30s ask questions, they seek out information, they love to be able to know every single week what is going on in their body and how they are developing and to be able to walk into the doctor’s office with that knowledge. So you have the maternity segment of the site that is for a younger generation primarily, and you have the encyclopedia which crosses over all the generations. Then to have the Surgeries & Procedures that is based on what your needs are. You don’t just generally go to a website and start looking up cancer care, or look up a certain type of procedure unless you, your loved one, or somebody else needs that information. To be able to have it easily accessible, in the language you understand with illustrations that take you through it makes you a better patient.  And you’re able to go to your doctor and have a better or higher level of conversation with them. Then you have the quicksheets, I love the quicksheets. It is something that I was very excited about and our physician marketing group recently came out and said, boy doctors really like those Quicksheets!  It is a learning curve for them with something like that.  They have not had a tool before. What we did was create our own flyers so that they are able to talk to patients about this, to take them through it to show them how they can update these sheets and create their favorites. And have a little library, if you have primarily the same type of patients you can pre-print these, and at the bottom you can just write in your comments. So what a great tool that reaches the consumer, the patient, and the physicians who are our audience as well. Each one of those 4 tools are used in a different way.

Actually we did.  A group of our neurosurgeons went through the list of neurology procedures in Surgeries and Procedures and then looked at some of the ortho procedures that were listed. They saw that for some of the procedures, neurosurgery does them as well, since 60 - 80 percent of their business is spine. So I contacted A.D.A.M. and just presented our viewpoint. They reviewed it and came back and said you’ve got a point. We can make this change for the link from your site for this content and they did it. And again it maintained that medical integrity - I don’t want to start skewing it, and that has to be a real challenge on your side because everyone wants to showcase their own area, but they listened to what I had to say and they came back with an action plan.  Our surgeons were thrilled and I am happy that it is a correct change.

We could definitely do more with it.  Through National Resource Corporation’s Healthcare market survey we found we were the most viewed website in Atlanta, so that is very nice. I think because we are a community hospital and people start building their relationship with us, for many of them through maternity, and being that women are primary decision makers for healthcare. When you start a relationship, a very positive relationship from maternity in their 20s and if the experience was a good experience then it grows. Northside has a very positive relationship with the community. And we are very trusted so they come to our site to view what we have to offer. I think it is a pleasant surprise to them that we have the medical content and we want to be able to have our site be a trusted source where that is the only place they go.  

It was a quick way to add 10,000 pages of amazing medical information. We didn’t have to go that route, we could have very easily had a website that is attractive, that’s informative of our services. We really looked at that and chose to be more educational.

I could have left the site the way it was and it probably would have been easier. I think dealing with A.D.A.M. is an easy process.  I feel that I have access to a variety of departments without it being that feeling of an agency.   And that is how I like to work. I came from the ad agency side. So my perspective, my training is a little different than somebody that starts on the other side of the desk. And so being able to have an idea and whether I am talking to Chris or Julia or Phil, they are just very responsive so that makes it easier for me. 

QuickSheets, they really like that.  I think once we create a larger area for the physicians instead of having it a small section for them to go to it will enrich that relationship.

Just looking at other product lines, and I could not tell you who they were because it was too long ago but, I rarely got a call back. I looked at what hospitals were using regionally and I looked at their tools. And  I just felt the content flowed easily visually and it was appealing and the conversation that I had with University of Maryland who is so far ahead of us in what they are using it for, so that they have been there done that.  That all contributed to my decision, to our decision. 

We promote the QuickSheets in our Physician Newsletters.  We also promote the fact that we have the Health Illustrated Encyclopedia and the Pregnancy Center. I had presented to a luncheon for OBGYN.  They have a very close and constant relationship with their patients during the 9 months when a woman is pregnant, along with the GYN relationship.  I presented the A.D.A.M. content to them in a slideshow presentation we had, and created a flyer that sort of took them through it. I think they were the most responsive. They really, really liked that. Obviously they answer so many questions every week but for the most part a woman’s experiences at week 5, week 10, week 30, is pretty much the same, at the same level of development. So a tool like this makes it easier for them to steer patients to that information online, and then they are able dedicate more time to any specific issue they may be having. We have created tools to be handed out and promoted whether it is an info card or a flyer in our internal newsletters. We have a publication that went out to 240,000 homes and we put it in there. So we are trying to drive more and more traffic towards the web. I think that this is what healthcare is all about. I  feel that there is a responsibility for our community to be able to provide information, so they are able to make healthcare decisions for themselves, for their families, I feel that is our job, that is our responsibility.

I feel that they are part of my staff, that we are all part of the same team and it is not a vendor relationship. I wouldn’t bother if it were a vendor relationship. It is a team relationship they are my experts. And that is what I go to them for.

What I find interesting, without a doubt, is their access to the internet and their growing up with access to the internet and being driven to it through school to get information instead of going to a library where you have one or two books to choose from. Obviously those in their 20’s and beginning to mid 30’s is a generation where the internet is such a tool that they take it for granted because it has always been there. We are also finding that older generations are dabbling in the internet and being able to provide a name that they trust is very important. Because those in their 40’s and 50’s on up are not really used to asking as many questions or having as much information to be as educated in our health as the younger generation.  I think people are embracing it tremendously.

We have, I don’t think because our content on our actual site is not that different. The addition of the A.D.A.M. content is definitely something we need to promote and get out there more if we really, really want to increase our traffic. I think it enhances our brand to have that information.