E-marketing to online patients

“Area Doctors to Treat Patient’s Online”

Just as the physician’s office once replaced the house call, the computer screen is now poised to replace the office visit. Blue Cross Blue Shield, one of the largest local insurance companies, plans to introduce online care this year, a service that allows patients to connect with a physician on demand 24 hours a day using webcams for video links, secure text messages or telephone conversations. Patients will be able to talk from their home, workplace or anywhere else with a computer connection to one of hundreds of primary care doctors. Similar to ebay.com, patients will be allowed to rate each encounter.

This marketing strategy shift from brick and mortar to an online model is seen by advocates as a way to address a shortage of physicians who provide basic medical care and the long waits for appointments, reduce unnecessary trips to hospital emergency rooms and help patients with chronic illnesses and multiple medications better manage their conditions1.

American Well is the Boston based technology company that has partnered with various health plans, like Blue Cross and Blue Shield, to deliver this technology. Many Americans are would-be prospects for online care. Half say they would be interested in using the Internet not only as an information source but to receive healthcare directly, according to a recent survey by an arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers2.

Receiving health care directly could be in the form of a telephone call, text message or a “cybervisit”. Managed Care Magazine explains in further detail exactly what a “cybervisit” is: Cybervisits are internet analogs of house calls that can take place at work, on vacation, or anywhere there is computer access. Patients log into health plan Web sites. If they do not have webcams for a video linkup, they can use secure text messages or telephone conversations connected though a secure system. Once a patient calls in, the selected physician has 30 to 45 seconds to respond or the patient is redirected to another physician. The standard charge typically buys a 10-minute visit that can be extended for an additional fee. Doctors can file non-narcotic prescriptions online for patients to retrieve at 24-hour pharmacies. And when the call ends, the patient has the option to forward a transcript of the visit to his or her usual doctor3.

This topic is a very interesting e-marketing topic because we are able to see the paradigm shift of how medicine is being delivered before our very eyes. While cyber visits will never fully replace a traditional hospital stay, they will serve as a welcome reprieve to anyone wishing to connect online in hopes of receiving immediate care. In fact, online care seems the only logical step in our society that continues to seek immediate gratification. Furthermore, not only are we witnessing the medium in which care is delivered change, we will likely also see doctors begin to market themselves online in hopes that patients seek them out as opposed to a competitor.

It will also be very interesting to see how this shift to online medicine will affect related industries such as the brick and mortar physician offices. While brick and mortar physician’s office certainly will not become extinct, there is a probability that they will experience a decline in utilization as more and more people begin to adopt online care. The health insurance companies will also be inevitably affected as they will realize a decrease in the claims paid, since a ten minute cyber visit costs significantly less than an in person office visit. In addition, companies like skype will be positively affected as more and more online care patients will turn to skype to contact their physician.





1. Davis, Henry L. “Area Doctors to Treat Patient’s Online” The Buffalo News. March 10, 2010. http://www.buffalonews.com/incoming/article37915.ece
2. Johnson, Megan. “Visiting Your Doctor Online is a Virtual Reality” US News and World Report. October 27, 2009. http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/articles/2009/10/27/visiting-your-doctor-online-is-a-virtual-reality.html
3. Glabman, Maureen. “House Call Revival, Digital Style”. Managed Care Magazine. January 2010. http://www.managedcaremag.com/archives/1001/1001.cybervisits.html
4. http://americanwell.com/index.html

Did Twitter Cost McChrystal His Command?

General Stanley McChrystal possessed two masters degrees, attended three different military schools, earned 13 prestigious badges and served in three wars overseas yet he faced his greatest enemy of all was that of Twitter4 . What started off as nonchalant remarks that carelessly rolled off the tongue of McChrystal with a Rolling Stones reporter in earshot, quickly ignited a firestorm of seismic proportions on Twitter. “It was the article from Michael Hastings that broke the story, but it was Twitter who got the story rolling”.

Michael Hastings was a reporter for the Rolling Stones Magazine who spent two years in Afghanistan with General McChrystal2. It was Hastings article, “The Runaway General”, that first exposed the way in which McChrystal’s team disparaged Obama administration officials. While Hastings article first appeared in newsstands on Thursday, June 24, a Rolling Stones spokesman leaked the story to the Associated Press on Monday, June 21 which resulted in a conflagration of tweets from various people including Andrea Mitchell, NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent. By the time the Monday night news aired, McChrystal was the top story, all the while, the Rolling Stones article was days away from the shelves.

After news of the story leaked, America continued to follow the progression of this situation on Twitter. Samantha Guthrie, an NBC news correspondent updated her Twitter followers by announcing that McChrsytal was summoned to a meeting at the White House on Monday night3. The rest of the story soon came out and McChrystal was soon trending high on Twitter’s trending list listed in the 10th position, behind the World Cup and Wimbledon1. At Tuesday’s meeting at the White House, McChrsytal was fired and replaced less than 24 hours after the first tweet, much faster than the three weeks President Truman took to replace General MacArthur over the latter’s criticism of the Korean War effort.

This article shows that the role and importance of social media has extended beyond a social perspective and has dramatically impacted business, institutions, and governments. In fact, Andrea Mitchell from NBC has over 9695 Twitter followers, while Sarah Palin has over 1,680,644 followers on Facebook. While it clearly was the content of the article that Hastings published that caused the controversy, it was Twitter that rapidly accelerated the dissemination of information so the public and news media could obtain updates by the minute regarding the latest happenings. Before McChrystal even had a chance to apologize, the spread of information via Twitter already convicted him of wrongdoing in the court of public opinion.

The original intended impact of social media such as Twitter and Facebook was to connect with friends, family, and colleagues. It actual impact today stands to do to cable-news networks what cable news did to broadcast. Timpane said in his article that “We've gone from the one-day news cycle to every hour on the hour to second by second1."

Sources
1Timpane, John. “New Media too Speedy to Outflank” Philly.com. Web. 24 June 2010.
http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20100624_New_media_too_speedy_to_outflank.html


2 Hastings, Michael. “The Runaway General” Rolling Stone 1108/1109
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236?RS_show_page=0

3 Shachtman, Noah. “Did Twitter cost McChrystal his Command” CNN Wired. Web. 28 June 2010
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/06/28/twitter.mcchrystal.wired/index.html?iref=allsearch

4 Council on Foreign Relations. “Biography of General Stanley McChrystal. Published in 2010.
http://www.cfr.org/publication/19396/biography_of_general_stanley_mcchrystal.html