The cost of having a web presence

So you’ve made the decision that your practice needs a presence on the web —a portal through which you could provide valuable information to your patients. You then contracted with a website developer for such a site and populated it with things such as the practice’s office hours, contact information, services provided, pictures, and some biographical information on your staff. The problem, however, is that you need to keep this information fresh and updated.

Having a web presence is good and a step in the right direction for many practices, but unfortunately having a static unrefreshed site, which happens more frequently than imagined, could be a waste of time and effort. With a practice website the real benefits are derived from interactivity. When you develop a website always give patients a reason to keep coming back, doing so will enable you to answer affirmatively the question of, is it worth the cost to have a web presence or a practice portal?

For some practices, launching a web portal arises out of a natural need or desire to extend the reach of their practice, and make communication and healthcare delivery more efficient and effective for both patients and doctors. For some having a practice web portal was a logical and efficient way to reach both current and potential patients. In some cases prospective patients have chosen a practice on the fact that they had a web presence while others did not.

The decision to be present on the web is a matter of remaining competitive and meeting the patient demand for secure, efficient, electronic communication. To fulfill these requirements a practice web portal needs to be very secure for the type of information that will be handled through this means of interaction. Web portals need to be compliant with medical regulations to ensure that they meet these standards.

On the surface, then, it would be easy to think that having a practice portal is more about being patient-centered rather than simple money, but both elements determine a practice portal’s worth. To be able to answer 15 e-mails in less than 10 minutes is much more efficient than taking three or four times as long to field the same number of phone calls and staff time is also maximized by not having to spend as much time on the phone to schedule patient appointments, if they can do that themselves online. Or if a patient only wants to know the results of a recent test it only takes one or two sentences in an email compared to having a phone conversation which could take up to 5 minutes.

Being able to broadcast a patient newsletter or get information out fast is also another great incentive to having a web portal, as patients can register to receive updates. This makes the portal equitable, in that all patients are alerted at the same time and it saves staff time and money not having to call patients, or having patients calling the office and asking about the availability for something like the flu shot.

So does having a web presence give you benefits in money alone, the answer is quite simply no, it needs to be alive and active with things that patients want. The quality of the patient–physician interaction and the degree of the engagement of the patient in their own care is also a benefit, giving them the choice to make decisions in their healthcare, to be able to make appointments, track results or get questions answered is all part of improving people’s health.

So the cost of having a web presence is invaluable and if done right, the benefits of a practice portal extends beyond mere dollars and cents.

Google Health in Dentistry

Google Health is a personal health information centralization service ( a.k.a personal health record (PHR).This service allows Google users to voluntarily gives their health records manually or by signing to their accounts partner with health services providers.

Volunteered information can include health conditions,medications,allergies and laboratory results.Once it entered,Google health use the information to give users a merged health record,information on conditions and possible interactions on drugs,conditions and allergies.

Google Health has a privacy concerns,meaning it can only access medical information voluntary given by individuals.It doesn’t retrieve any personal medical records without permission and action.However,it encourage users to set up profiles for other individuals.

Like other Google products.Google Health is free to use.There is no cost to sign up.You can store and manage all your health information in one place.All you need is to create an account with Google username and password.So this is safe,your health information only belongs to you and it’s your decision on how much information you want to share and who you want to share it with.Google Health doesn’t sell person’s data.They store information privately and secure.
Check their Privacy Policy here:

At Google Health,it can help you track your medical history.Making all your health information organize and easily located will help keep your doctors up to date when you visit them.It help you more better to coordinate your care by sharing your health records with your family members,friends,healthcare provider or anyone in your network.
You can also refill prescription online,ask for second opinion or get personalized health information based on your profile.
Google Health is also free to their partners.Doctor’s offices,Hospitals,Pharmacies and other companies that partner with Google Health are no charge so that they can import medical records into their account safely and securely.

As with Google Health in Dentistry,here you can get information to help you find a dentist,get information on various dental procedures and latest tips for pain elimination.

Many Dentists use computers to handle their business.It is not the online presence that help you to run a better practice, it is to give and share better information about your services.

There are four reasons why dentistry need to have better information.This are:

a.) To make more money
b.) To save money
c.) Provide better care for your patients
d.) Reduce the risk of doing harm to your patients

Google Health in Dentistry can provide such information from dental clinics services,locations,latest techniques to help patient relieve their pain,frequently asked questions that will help patients problem evaluated to determine the solution that is right for them..
Google Health in Dentistry helps users to look up for dental practice by browsing their online health services provided in the directory and also to see who is on top of the list and everything users need to know about their dental care from one of dentistry’s experts.

With Google Health it helps Dentistry to have more patients because of the information given to share about their practice where users,patients seeking information on what services they have that users are looking for,and it’s makes them satisfy and decide who they want to contact and check the practice in person and/or make appointment with the help of Google Health.

"Google Health’s primary focus is to provide a good user experience and meeting users needs".

Google Enterprise

Google Enterprise is amongst other useful applications, primarily a customizable search engine for websites and entire corporate file systems.
Instead of the “regular” Google search we all know all too well, Enterprise can be configured to only return results within an organization and/or it’s affiliates.
The main advantage here is speed.

Google Enterprise products makes your users more productive by combining the innovation and ease of Google’s consumer products with features,security and support that a organization requires.
Google Enterprise offers a wide range of products to help you organize your corporate information and securely make it available in any location.
It has two version tools( Google Desktop and Google Toolbar) that enables you to centrally control,manage and deploy user features,encrypt all users data in search index files and enforce document retention policies.The best part is,you can download it for free.

Google Desktop for Enterprise and Google Toolbar for Enterprise:

Google Desktop helps you easily manage the ever-growing mountain of information located on your computers and includes key standards-based administrator features that provide enhanced security,centralized configuration and easy company-wide deployment.

Boost your productivity to:

- Find email,files,media,web history and chats instantly
- View web pages they’ve seen,even when they are not online
- View search results from your intranet,Google and their own desktop in one place
- Deploy Google gadgets,mini applications such as a calendar or Wi-Fi indicator
- View timely,targeted information from the new and improved sidebar

Google Toolbar for Enterprise provides powerful productivity features including easy access to Google,customized search buttons,instant search suggestions,and a pop-up blocker.Google Toolbar for Enterprise also includes administration and control for business environments.It also enables IT administrators to give employees the productivity features of the google toolbar.

Employee Features:

- Enhanced Search Box
- Custom Buttons
- Bookmarks
- Pop-up blocker,Spell Check,Word Translator
- Highlight,Word find buttons,Address bar browse by name

Administrator Features:

- Simple and safe to deploy
- Standards-based information
- Search Corporate Network
- Customizable search buttons
- Test before distributing
- Pop-up Whitelist

Thousands of companies around the world use Google Enterprise solutions to find the righr information and collaborate and communicate with each other.Google Enterprise Partner offers enterprise integration, customize solution,complementary products and training.
Google Enterprise has partner programs that has strong expertise in one of the following:

- Customization,integration,and development
- Deployment or Installation
- Training
- An application integrated with a Google Enterprise product
- Sales and Distribution.

Some benefits you’ll get with Google Enterprise are:

- Increase the time users spend on the website
- Encourage collaboration
- Unifies search
- Acts as a gateway
- Grows with information
- Reduces rebundant work and duplication of effort
- Exceed users expectations
- Delivers user to relevant content
- Boosts sales and increases customer satisfaction

So why Google?
Google was founded with a clear vision in mind “To organize the world’s information and make it universally and useful”.And so the world’s number one search engine was born.Google realized to fulfill their mission to help organize not only in publicly available information,but also the valuable information.

Google Voice

Google Voice gears up to become the next big thing for the search giant.
The already impressive features of this new service just may be the communication
solution for many businesses and also personal use.

The main feature is of course the ability to have one and one number only
for all your phones.
That's correct - Google Voice allows for one number to be used for your Cell phone, home and office, etc.
You may even designate which phone rings at what time depending on who's calling.

For Example:

You have to leave your place of business every Tuesday and Thursday morning to pick up a new shipment of supplies.However,you want to stay on top of things during that time.
So you can designate your most important clients to reach you at your cellphone, and the less crucial contacts to be routed to your office assistant instead.
They won’t even know the difference. Of course you can achieve a similar effect with call forwarding from other phone companies.


If you are in the medical field, let's say a surgeon or dentist practicing in a clinic setting or hospital, this feature could really work well for you.
Your fellow doctors would not have to sift through their phone to find your cell number in order to bypass the front office and get therefore exchange info more efficiently.
You could still be reached by colleagues or friends while you’re on the way to a conference or a similar situation all without the need to provide multiple phone numbers.


Other features include, but are not limited to:

* Call screening - Announce and screen callers
* Listen in - Listen before taking a call
* Block calls - Keep unwanted callers at bay
* SMS - Send, receive, and store SMS
* Place calls - Call US numbers for free
* Taking calls - Answer on any of your phones
* Phone routing - Phones ring based on who calls
* Forwarding - Add phones and decide which ring
* Voicemail transcripts - Read what your voicemail says
* Listen to voicemail - Check online or from your phone
* Notifications - Receive voicemails via email or SMS
* Personalize greeting - Vary greetings by caller
* Share voicemail - Forward or download voicemails


Other upcoming features:

* Conference - Join people into a single call
* Call record - Record calls and store them online
* Call switch - Switch phones during a call
* Mobile site - View your inbox from your mobile
* GOOG-411 - Check directory assistance ( Free )
* Manage groups - Set preferences by group


You can view short and informative clips for each feature at the website for Google Voice here:

As of the time of this article there are quite a few companies working on incorporating Google Voice into their own service such as OnState Communications.

OnState Communications enables Google Voice to become a full-fledge PBX for your business at a fraction of the cost of other providers.

This once again pits Google against other heavyweights in their quest of total net domination,such as Microsoft,Skype and Comcast just to name a few.

Google Apps in modern Health Care

As we discovered in the previous article in this series on the impact of the World Wide Web on Healthcare,

Google is at the forefront of online applications.

These Web Apps have more than one promising feature that localized information storage solutions do not.

The most obvious is the ability to share and access information instantly from virtually anywhere.

Imagine many thousands of Spreadsheets ready to extract data from.They can be used by more than one person in different locations at all the same time.

No more emailing attachments which the receipient may not be able to view or store on his/her system.

No more fax machine battling and phone tagging or even hand delivering of documents.

How much time can be saved with proper implementation?

The phrase "Time is Money" comes to one's mind!

SF Bay Pediatrics has been using Google Apps since December for the kind of non-sensitive communications that keeps a clinic running smoothly.

Excerpt from Media submitted by John Furrier to PodTech.Net:

"Traditionally the health care industry is — I would go so far to say decades behind in terms of using information technology.The collaboration via emails,the exchange of information it’s very slow to travel when almost any physicians or groups get together that's what they talk about is is the fact that information only goes out by word of mouth and then our inter-office communications about calendar,spreadsheets or documents was paper.In my particular business where we all have to be somewhere among the various doctors and it changes to some degree and we all have to know where each of us is, if you forget your paper then you forget where you are and then you have to call somebody and find out..

The reason why I choose Google Apps for my domain was, it was a very cost-effective feature rich,it’s very good solution. It had almost everything we needed to get off the ground and it really only took about a half-a-day to implement and do it......."

-Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

In addition to Google's already impressive lineup of free online applications, the company also realized an entirely new service titled simply Google Health.Google Health is not what you may think. It is not a more innovative way to search for medical information.

It is much more than that. Google Health aims to become your One-Stop solution to store, track and (if desired) share your personal health data.

Google Health wins with a very user friendly interface and a gentle learning curve.
On the other side there are serious privacy concerns involved with your most personal data sitting somewhere on a machine in Goggle's maze of servers. Google assures you that they are doing everything possible to keep your private data safe. But it's no secret that there are many potential dangers.

For Example:

Hackers with bad intentions get better all the time.

Hurricane Katrina wiped out data to the point where people could not prove that they are who they claim to be.

Companies often do not honor their promises AND get away with it too often.

All things considered, Google Health has great potential, but ultimately it all depends on the user whether it will become a fixture in the way healthcare is dealt with on a daily basis.

You can take a quick tour at Google Health's website.

Diagnosis Google Health

Editor Rafe Needleman and News.com's Kara Tsuboi discuss the recent launch of Google Health,a service that allows users to compile their medical records online.

-Courtesy of CNET TV-

©2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.

Google Apps is a service from Google for using custom domain names with several Google products.It features several Web applications with similar functionality to traditional office suites, including: Gmail.Google Calendar, Talk, Docs and Sites.

Because everything is online,you can access Google Apps securely from home,from your dorm office or even from your mobile phone.Implementing Google Apps from your office,school or group.It just requires a few quick changes to your domain settings.



Finally,after 5 years,Google Apps ( Gmail,Google Calendar,Google Docs and Google Talk ) are now out of beta.

According to Launch Event Washington,DC ( Matthew Glotzbach of Google Enterprise,Product Management Director ) ,said the change reflected Gmail’s maturity.He also said that different teams at Google had different criteria for what is beta meant,and that Google felt a need to standardize those.
“It is time to address the issue and bring the products out of beta”

The Internet and Google in Today's Healthcare Industry

Google in Healthcare

In today's technology driven society, the internet is changing the way we do things in everyday life as well as in business.
The Health care industry is no exception. Actually it is far from it, since information is the key to be successful. Whether you are a provider, practitioner, patient or industry employee, to have your facts straight is in your best interest.

Information is easier accessible to more people today than ever before in the history of humankind.

If you have access to the internet, you have virtually instant access to many Petabytes (What's this..?) of information literally right at your fingertips. All you need is a browser like Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Mozilla's Firefox and a search engine.


When we talk about search engines, of course one name stands out:

GOOGLE!

Google has championed the search engine game for close to 10 years now. No matter what you type into Google’s search box, most likely it will return thousands of hits somewhat relevant to your query.

For example, a quick search for "Sore Throat" returned 5,580,000 results.

According to Internet World Stats the internet is available to about 1.6 Billion people as of 2009. That’s close to a quarter of the world's population.

The Internet's user growth trend between the years 2000 and 2008 was at a staggering 342.2 %.

As a business, the question to have or not to have a presence on the Internet is reduced to a rhetorical one after reviewing these numbers.

Google strives to become the all-in-one internet solution.Besides the world's most powerful search engine,Google also offers plenty of very useful web-based applications which we will cover in a later article.

In C.Peter Waegemann's report "The Role of the Internet for Today's Healthcare",
Mr.Waegemann (Chief Executive Officer,Medical Records Institute,and Chairman,Healthcare Informatics Standards Board,American National Standards Institute) elaborates:

" One of the main problems with today's healthcare is that the practitioner does not have relevant patient information with which to make informed decisions.
This occurs in 22% to 38% of the time that a patient is seen.Not having relevant information relating to the patient's medical history is not mostly due to lost or misfiled medical records,but to the fact that patients are seen in different medical entities that do not necessarily share patient information.

In the US,a whole industry - that of the emergency departments - is thriving on the fact that there is no patient history available when a patient comes in."

Google is providing increasingly sophisticated web-based solutions to issues such as the aforementioned with more speed and frequency than any of the competition.
You can find an overview of Google’s Products at this link, and Google Apps here

With the ability to use those applications on virtually any device connected to the World Wide Web,they posses an advantage over traditionally system-side applications.

In the next article of this series we will focus on Google Applications and their various uses in today's Healthcare Industry.

References:

Waegemann
Internet World Stats

Google for Healthcare

Google Gets Into Healthcare

Google Inc. is now on the market as a healthcare information aggregator and storehouse for our personal health. The idea is to use google servers and basic interface to upload, store and share personal health information.
At Google, we often get questions about what we're doing in the area of health.The interesting thing is that Google greatest asset in this space is also its greatest weakness. If anyone can click the electronic health information portability problem Google can. However most people are not real seen on the idea of Google having access to their health information, in addition to our email, browsing history, and shopping habits.

Google stated goal of indexing the worlds information will come up squarely against there mission to "do no evil." With this much information about individuals the tempation to take advantage of all of that data will be impossible to resolve.

* Google aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful.
* Google and the health community have labeled sites and pages across the web making it easier for users to refine their health queries and locate the medical information they need.
* Google uses to monitor content about brand.
* Ability to verify and add information from other providers,pharmacies,etc.
* Google import Medical Records,explore medications and treatments.
* Google supports clearly an important part of the future of health care.

At Google, they feel patients should be in charge of their health information, and they should be able to grant their healthcare providers, family members, or whomever they choose, access to this information. Google was developed to meet this need.



With Google entering the medical record-keeping field, there's new hope for a workable centralized system for use by patients, hospitals, doctors, insurers, pharmacies -- basically, everyone in the healthcare loop. Google will have to succeed where many others have faltered, though, solving complex problems related to privacy, patient behavior, accessibility and standardization.


Helping Healthcare become more efficient

Delivering high-quality service and care efficiently and at reasonable costs is a priority for any healthcare organization. But even as technology evolves to support these efforts, a number of challenges still get in the way of the technological efficiency of many healthcare organizations.

Time and money spent dealing with regulations and legal issues are two often-mentioned challenges. Managing security and preventing threats are others. Productivity that's lost when information is hard to find, when medical records need to be physically duplicated and shared, or when data security or privacy becomes an issue — these are just some of the obstacles facing many healthcare companies.

Google has been working on several initiatives designed to help healthcare companies overcome these obstacles.

* The latest on Google Health, which enables patients, providers, and hospitals to organize health information securely and cost effectively.

* The ways that Google Search Appliance provides fast, secure, and accurate access to all kinds of information inside your healthcare business – even data stored in most legacy repositories.

* A look at how Google's message security and archiving tools block email threats and deliver easy to use archiving at a fraction of the cost of other solutions.

Healthcare professionals have always focused on reducing costs while still increasing the quality of the care they provide to patients — and this kind of efficiency becomes even more important in challenging economic times.

Fortunately, healthcare providers can turn to the web for a growing number of resources that help them achieve these goals. With our health initiatives and solutions for businesses of all kinds, Google is committed to helping bring exactly these kinds of productivity gains and cost reductions to healthcare providers. Google also committed to harnessing the power of the web to help people everywhere effectively manage their healthcare records and information in a private, secure online setting.