CLEVELAND, Ohio — Cleveland Clinic today unveiled Clevelandclinichealth.com, the hospital’s health-and-wellness portal and the latest in a string of online creations in the past year.
More health-care institutions have tried to turn their medical knowledge outward as they witness the success of social media and sites like WedMD. A site like MayoClinic.com is the standard bearer for the concept. And for nearly 15 years Case Western Reserve University, the University of Cincinnati and Ohio State University have developed the health-care question-and-answer site NetWellness.
The Clinic’s site, which redirects readers to a section of ClevelandClinic.org, culls the information from many of its print and other online publications, draws from a video database, includes an alphabetic index of health problems and intersperses personal stories about diseases.
“We have a tremendous amount of content on health and wellness topics,” said Paul Matsen, the Clinic’s chief marketing and communications officer. “We’ve been thinking for some time about a content-management strategy to use the content more effectively.”
The health system has significantly increased its online budget in the last two years. Even more recently it redesigned its main site, ClevelandClinic.org, and along with the new health site also launched ClevelandClinic-jobs.com. The three sites represent the primary reasons people visit hospital Web sites: appointments, health information and jobs, Matsen said.
Online advertising is better at finding potential patients at their “moment of need” when they want health information (or an appointment) immediately, Matsen said. The Clinic now advertises on more than 100 Web sites, has struck some new partnerships with online publications and become more aggressive in promoting the hospital through Internet searches, Matsen said. Later this year it will add more enhancements to its main site and expand its efforts in social media, Matsen said. The new health site could soon include doctor blogs and interactive “social media” conversations by physicians, he said.
Matsen wouldn’t say how much more the Clinic spends online, but said there’s been a transformative change in that area in the past 18 to 24 months.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The Clinic’s new health site promotes the institution much more than other hospitals have on their similar sites. The Clinic includes a section touring hospital innovations and research, for example, while some of its videos — such as one on a facial reconstruction surgery — are heavier than others on crediting the work of the physicians rather than explaining the treatment from a consumer point of view.
But the site also communicate a rare kind of intimacy by mixing personal stories with care, said Susan Wentz, a Case Western Reserve University faculty who direct both NetWellness and the school’s Urban Area Health Education Center.
“There’s always room for engagement of that kind because medicine is so complicated,” Wentz said. “Hearing the words doesn’t do the job of explaining. What this site is doing is going that next step to illuminate both the health care that happens at the Cleveland Clinic and what people can then do about it.”
Matsen said the new health site won’t generate direct revenue for the Clinic. Instead it’s meant to raise awareness, increase the Clinic’s visibility nationally and draw more patients from throughout the country.
The site is also the latest effort to develop the Clinic’s wellness offerings. Since luring national personality Dr. Michael Roizen to the system, it has created non-profit and for-profit wellness enterprises and launched an intense wellness treatment program dubbed Lifestyle 180, among other things.
