Short Link: http://j.mp/8anB6i
We’re about to unveil our new website at www.encounterpro.com, which if it still looks like
has not been updated yet, but if it looks like
then it has indeed been unveiled.
I’m excited about this new site, for a number of reasons. First, simply put, it’s bigger and better than the old site. Second, I think the timing is right–we’ve been speaking and writing (and demonstrating with the EncounterPRO Pediatric EMR Workflow System) the importance of usable workflow for more than a decade, and workflow and usability are beginning to catch on in a big way. Third, I think the new product website and this six month old blog about EMRs, workflow, usability, and business process management will complement each other very well.
In a previous post (Walking the Fine Line between Marketing and Education) I wrote about the important role education plays in marketing a product based on new technology, such as workflow management and business process management systems (new at least to the healthcare market). I asked the question of how much you should trust what I say about the topic. The answer was that while you need to take everything I say with the proverbial grain of salt, if I provide interesting and useful information, respect you and your intelligence, and disclose my self-interest (which I clearly do), then you have enough information to answer that question yourself.
A Grain of Salt
For the most part, this blog sells an idea, not a product, in the belief that an educated market makes better decisions and a market that makes better decisions (particularly about pediatric EMR usability and workflow) directly benefits us. However, as educational as I try to make this blog, I acknowledge that it also contains a dose of marketing. I’m aiming for about an 80/20 mix of education to marketing, although I’m not at all sure how I could substantiate that I have achieved this. If I were to count words, the word “EncounterPRO” would certainly be less than one percent. If I were to count posts that mention EncounterPRO, the number would be north of 70-80 percent, and yet some of my most educational posts mention EncounterPRO. This difficult to untangle relationship between education and marketing is actually a strength. I am motivated to make this blog as educational as possible because of *both* educational *and* marketing goals.
The about to be released product website for the High-Usability EncounterPRO Pediatric EMR Workflow System is a different animal, but subject to the same principles about mixing education and marketing. The major difference is in the intended ratio of educational to promotional content. Whereas this blog strives to be substantially more about education than product promotion, the product website is going to be about half and half. If I (or anyone) could actually measure this sort of thing, I’d go for 51 percent education and 49 percent marketing (sort of like keeping education as the majority owner).
On our new product website, in common with my blog, there will be tutorials, blog post-like short essays, and links to educational resources about workflow and business process management. But there will also be more “salesy” statements (and restatements) of compelling value propositions, catchy tag lines (”Live in Five!”), and repeated prominent placement of the classic Johnson Box (a big colorful box with a call to action). There will be considerable cross-linking between the product website and my blog. I’ll even be adding a form to request product info or a demo, which will obviously affect perceived ratio of education to marketing (though I hope not too much).
My blog will benefit from the product website. I expect some visitors will land on the product site and occasionally follow a link here. I will also likely link to pages or subsections of the product website. My blog necessarily has a less formal, chatty style in which one post or comment begets another post or comment, with occasional biographical details or *attempts* at wry humor. The product website is more formally organized and less personal, but also more self contained with respect to a number of EMR workflow management and business process management systems topics.
For example, I don’t have a glossary of workflow management systems terminology on this blog. I’ve thought about adding one. It would be a simple matter to cut and paste it from one of my white papers into a post or onto a new blog page. It just hasn’t come up (I try to be interesting, and glossaries tend to be very dry) and I haven’t needed the material (this is my 29th weekly post, and my list of future blog post topics has grown from about fifty to over eighty ideas). However, there is a logical place to put a glossary on the product website. And once it is there, I might as well refer to in a blog post or from my EHR WfMS resources page.
A Larger Grain of Salt
So, to paraphrase an earlier disclaimer, how much should you trust what we have to say on our new product website? After consuming a somewhat larger grain of salt, if we provide you useful and interesting information about our High-Usability EncounterPRO Pediatric EMR Workflow System, respect you and your intelligence, and disclose our self-interest, I suspect you can answer the question yourself.
P.S. Please visit www.encounterpro.com next week to learn more about our High-Usability EncounterPRO Pediatric EMR Workflow System.
3 Comments
As the guy who is responsible for Operations here at EncounterPRO, I have a similar struggle. Mine is not a struggle between Education and Marketing, it is a struggle between talking about where we are going and where we are now. Concentrating only on where we are going has the potential to make people believe we might not be in touch with day to day operations or may be in some kind of a state of denial. Concentrating only on where we are now, could lead people to conclude we have no vision for the future and no ideas on how to improve the situation.
Given that all customers and potential customers should take anything we or any of our competitors say with the afore mentioned grain of salt, I will attempt to provide some view of things that includes both the present and the future.
This has been a challenging year. The federal government’s foray into our market has provided a decidedly mixed blessing. While the government’s support of EHR’s is laudable and means that our combined market will almost certainly see exciting growth in the future, their lack of specific guidelines regarding “meaningful use” has made it difficult for practices to know exactly how to proceed. This has negatively impacted sales in the short term, but strengthened the sales pipeline in the intermediate term. There are lots of practices that know they need to move to EHR’s, but they are waiting until the government provides clarity before deciding to proceed.
We are getting lots of very positive feedback on our belief that one of the biggest concerns among practices considering moving to EHR’s is the loss of practice productivity they will have to endure while they become used to the EHR. We have concentrated on refining our implementation protocols and materials to make sure that we can actually get a new practice back to the level of productivity they were enjoying on paper by the time our Practice Skills Instructor finishes the on-site education.
We have also been exploring other partnerships that will not only increase the number of patient encounters a practice can complete in a given time period, but increase the revenue the practice will receive for the encounters completed. This double impact on the bottom line, more encounters and more dollars per encounter, will be a significant advantage in the economics of primary care medicine.
We understand Pay for Performance (P4P) and are preparing a product that will help practices measure and manage their performance against clinically accepted protocols. Better performance against protocols should result in better outcomes and better reimbursement.
We are also working on providing our customers with tools that will facilitate communication between the practice and patients. Giving patients better access to their own clinical information and helping patients provide the practice with information regarding their condition(s) on-line should result in better patient satisfaction and better practice profitability.
We are currently focused on integrating our new PM into EncounterPRO. The market is demanding a one source solution and we are preparing just that. We are defining what a truly integrated practice would look like and we see some very exciting possibilities.
All of that should provide people with a view of what it is we are working on for the future. For our current customers, we are working on redesigning our support process. We are preparing an on-line support tool and what we are calling EPRO University. Both of these tools will give practices and all of their personnel 24/7 access to information that will help them solve their own problems on their own schedule.
We are also working diligently on moving people to Version 5. Moving to Version 5 will provide many user benefits and the on-line support sources are linked directly to this version. Good information on how to do things in the screen in which a person is currently working will be just a “click” away.
While not everything I mentioned is currently available, we are working hard to, as Jean Luc Picard would say, “Make it so!” I hope this had provided some glimpse into the present as well as the future here at EncounterPRO.
Wow, I keep telling Frank he ought to have his own blog, but I’d hate to lose his thoughtful and in-depth replies to my own posts, so I almost hope he doesn’t.
The analogy between the trade-off between education and marketing on one hand, and where we are now and where we are going on the other hand, is intriguing. I’m going to have to think about that one and eventually get back to you (via this blog).
Thank you Frank, for giving me something to mull over for a while.
–Chuck
Still mulling…