The Fifth Annual National Health IT Week is being held June 14 -18, 2010 in Washington, DC. Join us for this collaborative forum where public and private healthcare constituents will work in partnership to educate industry and policy stakeholders on the value of health IT for the US healthcare system. Now, with the enactment of economic stimulus and healthcare reform legislation, there is no better time for the health IT community to come together under one umbrella to raise national awareness!

As marketers, we try our best to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to social media, its tools and its practices, and we do our best to communicate the advantages of a strong online presence to our clients and our bosses. In healthcare, we often take for granted how the Web is being used by consumers. Sixty-one percent of American adults use sites such as WebMD to find healthcare information, surgeons tweet from the OR to update concerned family members, and “e-patient” is a term with its own Wikipedia entry.

So imagine my surprise when I came across this article from Healthcare IT News on “ePediatrics.” This article references two surveys, each concerning trends in the desire and ability of parents to communicate electronically with their children’s doctors. The first poll, conducted by C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Knowledge Networks, reports that approximately 50 percent of parents believe e-mail or online communication would be useful for tasks such as requesting prescription refills or medical records. However, the same poll reports that less than 15 percent of parents are currently able to communicate online with their children’s healthcare providers. In a similar study by Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, 90 percent of parents said they would like to be able to e-mail their pediatrician, but only 11 percent can currently do so.

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I remember my first experience with a URL shortener. While browsing a thread on a popular forum about Ultimate Frisbee, my sport of choice during college, I came across a post linking to an older discussion on the same topic. But I hesitated when I noticed the link was to something called TinyURL.com with a few numbers and letters after the slash. Where is this going to take me? I hope it’s not spam, I thought before I clicked through. When I landed safely on the old thread, I quickly put two and two together: this is some sort of service that makes http://groups.google.com/group/rec.sport.disc/browse_thread/thread/c0fa74cf7c46cd57# appear as http://tinyurl.com/2ace2bt. But why?

Just a few years (and over 100 different URL shorteners) later, there are more answers to that question than most healthcare marketers can keep up with.

For the average consumer, the most popular and practical use for these shortening services is to fit links into Twitter posts. With a 140 character limit, posting a link with 80-100 characters seriously handicaps the tweeter’s ability to post his thoughts. The improved aesthetic quality, as demonstrated above, is another popular reason to shorten a URL. When posting on a forum or in the comments section of a blog, where in-text linking is often not available, using a shortened URL gives your post a cleaner look that is more pleasing to the eye of the reader.

But what separates the different shortening services, and why is it important for healthcare marketers to choose the right shortener? The number one thing that public relations professionals have to answer for with any social media campaign is still ROI. The popular Twitter client HootSuite provides stats through its proprietary short link ow.ly. Any link posted with HootSuite is automatically converted to the ow.ly format, and stats are kept for each tweet that is sent out. Bit.ly, the most popular service with 3.4 billion links created in March of this year, has developed a fairly robust measurement system. As discussed in a past Word of the Week feature, with a free account, bit.ly users can keep up with the number of clicks that each created link has received. The service is also integrated with Twitter, which allows users to see each time the link is tweeted and retweeted. Your boss is bound to be less skeptical about Twitter when you let him know how many page views one tweet can generate, in addition to regular traffic.

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For the last three weeks, the tragic earthquake in Haiti has been top of mind for citizens of America and the world. As aid continues to pour in to Haiti, we’re beginning to see innovative ways in which medical treatment is being given. As we recently wrote, mHealth applications are making it easier to administer healthcare in remote areas and developing countries. The video below shows Dr. Elizabeth Cote, of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, collecting patient information in Haiti using an iPhone. The program she’s using is called iChart, and the developers have customized the software on short notice in order to comply with international disaster data collection standards.