Spending time in a doctors office often means a lot of waiting. And while many offices provide magazines or access to a TV to keep patients busy, there are better ways to keep those waiting occupied.
Physicians Broadcast Network, Americas leading digital signage provider, enables physicians offices and hospitals to market their products and services to patients while they are waiting in the office or in an examination room. The company, established in 2007, also creates CDs that patients can take home in order to learn more about a physicians practice or a specific medical procedure.
“We started Physicians Broadcast Network after seeing a big need in the healthcare market for patient education and communication,” explained CEO Benjamin Kirk Howell, who started the company with President J.R. Rance after years spent in the digital signage business. “To this end, we have created a complete communications platform designed to educate patients and visitors on a physicians practice in a professional, entertaining, educational way while helping the physician to market his or her services.” While patients are waiting, they can learn more about the practice through messages delivered by their doctors, viewed on flat-screen TVs. “Physicians and surgeons are very busy, and have little time to begin the educational process with patients,” said Rance. “By providing real-time, customized content to patients while they wait, doctors can make sure that this education takes place.
(l-r) J.R. Rance and Benjamin Kirk Howell
In addition to the physicians message, the broadcast may also include generic healthcare news and RSS feeds, such as weather and CNN updates. Physicians can even update the message in real time to let patients know if they are running behind. “Messages can be updated instantaneously; by entering a password into our web portal, a hospitals back office can let visitors know when the lunchroom is open, for example,” said Howell.
“Programs can be completely customized to say whatever a physician wants,” said Rance, who added that the production team meets beforehand with physicians or hospital staffs to decide what messages to promote. “They can let their imaginations run wild.”
In addition to providing in-office communications, Physicians Broadcast Network also creates a dynamic interactive health or patient CD Rom for patients to take home. “When a person needs to have a knee replacement, a doctor will normally spend about 15 minutes in the office talking about what a patient can expect from the procedure,” said Howell. “Then they hand the person a folder with about 30 to 40 pages of information for them to review.”
“Now, patients can take home a user-friendly, completely customized CD that features their doctor talking to them about the procedure,” he continued. “While it does not completely eliminate all of the paperwork that a patient needs to deal with, it replaces about 95 percent of it.”
Physicians can also place a message on the CD that enables patients to click yes for future marketing messages that will later appear on their browsers. “Whats really unique is that all of this information is trackable,” said Howell. “We can tell how many times a person reviews the CD, as well as how long a person says in the browser window, what they viewed, and what they clicked on. We then give this information to the physicians or sponsors.”
In addition to working with doctors offices, Physicians Broadcast Network also provides this service to hospitals and their affiliated medical organizations. “An average hospital today has more than one million people coming through their facilities, yet when you ask them how they market to their patients, they talk about newsletters and brochures. We want to help bring them into the 21st century,” said Howell.
“Through our software, we have the ability to direct specific information to different floors of a hospital or to different departments,” added Rance. “For example, if the hospital wants to provide specific information to their cardiovascular division, or only to their pediatric floor, we can customize the program to do that.”
Depending on the size of the practice and the customization required, an investment in the system starts at about $1,000 per month, and financing is available through the company. The cost of the system can also be decreased through partnerships with companies who underwrite a portion of the cost in return for including their sponsorship messages. “The return on investment is immediate,” said Rance. “Patients are more informed about the doctor, their practice, the hospital or an upcoming procedure.
“Someone who comes into a plastic surgeons office for a tummy tuck can learn about that doctors expertise in eyelift surgery,” he continued. “They might later take advantage of that knowledge, or share it with others. The Network builds word-of-mouth and turns patients into a silent sales force for the doctor.”
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