Friday, October 3, 2008

Beth Israel launches Web 2.0 site

By Christopher Calnan

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has gone Web 2.0, completing a 15-month web project with the latest Internet-based tools designed to reach potential customers, which it hopes will launch the hospital among the leaders in health care.

The Boston-based hospital has equipped its website with the latest social networking tools and a decentralized content generation model — using 120 part-time web editors who contribute content about developments in their departments.

The website now includes features such as blogs, podcasts and forums. But its foundation is a content management system that enables employees from various areas of the hospital to generate up-to-date content rather than staid online newsletters, CIO John Halamka said.

“It’s not just brochure ware,” he said.

For example, the website, which launched just over two weeks ago, includes CarePages, an online tool that enables users to create special “minisites” that include updates on long-term patients. The feature enables caregivers to coordinate visits and post details on the patient’s treatments and condition.

Beth Israel’s website, launched in 1996, was last upgraded in 2002, Halamka said.

Nationally, the health-care industry is still early in adopting the latest Internet tools because IT isn’t a hospital’s core business, and tight budgets combined with time constraints make a cutting-edge web presence hard to justify. But Beth Israel has put itself at the vanguard of the movement to share health information via the Internet, said San Francisco-based consultant Matthew Holt, co-founder of Health 2.0 LLC, a health-care event organizer.

Health information has been more commonly shared through third-party sources and websites, such as Cambridge-based Sermo Inc. (for physicians) or Enhanced Medical Decisions Inc., also in Cambridge (whose DoubleCheckMD.com is aimed at patients). But because consumers typically get their health information from friends, family or online, Beth Israel’s website has been designed to provide that information — and convert queries into additional business for the hospital, Beth Israel director of marketing Rhonda Mann said.

Specifically, such interactions could include live online chats with physicians on topics such as gastrointestinal problems, Mann said. “From a marketing perspective, we think more and more people will find us online,” she said. “We felt it was really critical to have an awesome website.”

Holt said such web-based tools may help hospitals operate more smoothly, but they’re not revenue generators. “I think it increases the efficiencies of what they do,” he said.

Beth Israel, which posted more than $25 million in operating losses in fiscal 2002, has turned around those losses to operating surpluses since fiscal 2004. During 2007, the hospital treated about 750,000 patients, it said.

Hospital officials declined to disclose the cost of the website upgrade. The entire project, including the gathering of feedback from 5,000 employees, took about 15 months, Halamka said.

Improving a hospital website is a hybrid project that combines marketing with information technology to remove the “silos” within the hospital while reaching to consumers outside the hospital, said Ty Glasgow, CEO of BigBad Inc., the Boston web design firm that managed the upgrade.

“If it’s only one or the other, then it’s a failure,” he said. “It’s a project rather than your primary communication vehicle.”

The website attracted 5,034 unique visitors during its first week of operation, Mann said. But the hospital can’t track the number of patients the website generates for the hospital, she said.

Mann said the business strategy is to raise the profile of the hospital through information that will pay off in coming years — similar to age-old advertising strategies, but updated for the web-enabled consumer.

“People may not need you today,” she said, “but if they heard you on the radio, someday when they need you, they’ll think of you.”