With the notable exception of institutions like the Mayo Clinic, which have integrated mobile health and social media into their ecosystems, most hospitals just aren't up to speed when it comes to digital communication.
Only a handful of hospitals actually invest the time, money and personnel needed to spark a real connection with their audience and more importantly, maintain that connection over time. To wit, according to a new report from Evolve Digital Labs, only one in five hospitals has something as basic as pre-registration documents online to reduce patient wait time.
Sure, most hospitals have some elementary presence on all the major social media networks, especially Twitter and Facebook, but it's mostly a random post on eating healthy here or an announcement of some corporate undertaking there (yeah, right, consumers really want to hear about your new parking garage…).
Why are most hospitals falling behind in the digital race? Here's some of the more obvious reasons.
- Lack of digital talent onboard: While hospital marketing departments are expected to include digital marketing in their integrated marketing efforts, that's usually just one of the gazillion things they're expected to accomplish. While some digital marketing efforts may be included in a hospital's branding strategy, the actual activities needed to accomplish that goal are spread among overtaxed professionals or dumped on an intern. It's unusual you'll find a hospital, like Mayo, with a digital guru running the show. Hospitals need to invest in digital leadership to get the results worth having.
- Lack of internal support: Unless a hospital has a hip chief marketing officer in place, it's unlikely that hospitals will have a lot of momentum behind communicating via digital channels. Yes, yes, communicating online is critical in this day and age, but grasping its importance to hospitals doesn't come naturally to some C-suite execs. The hospital business is still a conservative business, and while they don't like to admit it, some health leaders are still afraid of putting themselves online.
- Overtaxed IT departments: You can't accomplish much technically without an IT department staffer—even the pre-reg papers we mentioned before have to be posted on our site by some web wrangler—and IT time and energy are just a liiiittle bit overdrawn at this point in many places. Even if all the IT staff had to do was manage the EMR rollout they'd already done, that would be plenty to keep them busy. But no, they have far more on their plate, including a soon-to-be unveiled ICD-10 rollout deadline, and they're absolutely overloaded.
While these may all be perfectly good reasons for digital mediocrity, sitting out the digital communication age can't last forever. As hospitals' key targets become millennials, the rising demographic group of 25-to 35-year-olds, they'll suffer badly for the digital sins if they don't make themselves available online. After all, the millennials don't just use digital tools—they live online. And if you don't meet them where they are, they won't be interested in you.