YourCareEverywhere.com is a content-rich patient portal, wellness companion and smartphone app all rolled into one. It is one the newer models of how to connect with patients.
I recently spoke with Stephen Outten, content strategy manager for YourCareEverywhere, about how differentiated content is at the center of their patient offering and how the collaboration between their marketing and IT teams went so well that Adobe wrote a case study about it.
1. Where did the idea for the site originate, and how is it different from other patient sites?
YourCareEverywhere originated as our company’s response to the healthcare consumerism movement and as a way to assist our hospital customers expand their digital presence and drive consumer and patient engagement.
YourCareEverywhere is different from other, more narrowly focused patient sites because not only does it offer single-sign-on to a consumer’s patient portal, but it’s also available for download as an iOS and Android app. And that’s on top of daily-updated consumer health news and content, plus wellness tool integration through device integration such as FitBit.
2. Which departments/teams were involved in the development?
The initial team was interdisciplinary and intentionally small, comprised of core Executive, Marketing, and Editorial team members. As conception turned into development, the team grew and solidified, and what started as a strategic project became a full division within the company. Daniel Hart, Executive Vice President of YourCareEverywhere, leads the division.
3. How did the team get all of the necessary buy-ins to proceed?
Because YourCareEverywhere was a CEO-driven project from conception, buy-ins were never really a challenge.
4. How did Marketing and IT collaborate during development?
Marketing carved out a mini-squad to lead creative direction on the project, and IT built out a YourCareEverywhere-focused team to implement the needed technology by our launch date. The collaboration went so well, and we deployed so rapidly, that Adobe, whose Adobe Experience Manager software is at the core of YourCareEverywhere, wrote a case study about our project.
5. How did you test it to know what patients want to see on a portal?
YourCareEverywhere is more than a portal—it offers health and wellness content, wellness tools, a patient portal and a mobile app, all wrapped in one solution. We worked extensively with our digital agency, VML, around user experience testing and response from concept to launch in order to finesse all of the finest points of the site. This user experience testing comes in addition to our own experience with our previously launched patient portal, which is one of the leading multi-tenant, cloud-based patient portals on the market today.
6. How are you marketing to consumers?
One of the primary ways we market to consumers is through differentiated content on YourCareEverywhere. We integrate our editorial calendar into seasonal campaigns focused on consumer health concerns, such as back-to-school health and wellness, fall allergies, etc. We then build both outbound and inbound marketing campaigns that originate from YourCareEverywhere and from local hospitals such as email newsletters, social media events, search engine marketing, online advertising, etc.
7. Why is it important for health care organizations to adopt new technologies quickly and find ways to innovate?
Bill Anderson, CEO of YourCareUniverse, says hospitals have traditionally acted as though they’re running factories when in reality, in today’s evolving healthcare market, they should act as if they’re running fast-paced retail operations. Innovative technology solutions will allow health systems to scale from patient to person to population rapidly, truly becoming epicenters of population health management with patient experience at the core of all they do.
If you would like your organization to be featured, email Jared Johnson at jared@ulteradigital.com.