Creating a website to meet the needs of multiple audiences spanning several states isn’t easy—especially when the national nonprofit’s mission is to help youth rehabilitate and reintegrate through a continuum of diversified services from residential programs to in-home counseling.

The Nexus Treatment website earned top honors among a field of strong contenders in the Best Website (Specialized Care) category of Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

Why? Because, like the other finalists, it provided information and reassurance, but it stood alone in its depth, breadth, and versatility.

Nexus offers residential treatment programs, group home living programs, transitional living programs, treatment foster care, inpatient acute psychiatric care, in-home counseling services, alternative-to-residential treatment services, adoption, referrals to other treatment providers, and ongoing support.

The Nexus website must meet the needs of referral agents, such as probation officers, social service workers, therapists, and counselors, as well as parents, foster parents, and prospective employees. It needs to provide a direct path to admission professionals, moving admissions to completion.

With site colors and subsites unique for each location or service line, the Nexus website has easy visual navigation and strong site identities within the national identity. It includes a wealth of resources, including videos, slide shows, client testimonials, contact information, and online forms.

The website receives more than 100,000 visits annually from across the U.S., with an average visit of nearly four minutes. In tracking admissions and calls of interest generated by the site, Nexus has validated a return on investment far exceeding its development cost.

If your organization has a complex, multifaceted operation with numerous locations, this is a site worth emulating.

We congratulate the team that collaborated on the winning effort: Jack Ewing, vice president, business development; Jen Wreisner, graphic design; and Ron Dutcher, Web development.

Visit the website here.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.

Have questions about coronary artery disease? This winning website offers answers and more.

Health care relationship marketing experts Daniella Koren Inc. (DKI) created a “Mind Your Heart” campaign that earned top honors in the Best Website (Pharma/Health Care Other) category of Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

DKI was charged by its client, Astellas Pharma US, with these goals:

• Create a database of qualified patients and caregivers at high risk for coronary artery disease (CAD).
• Build a relationship and engage with patients to raise awareness, reinforce messaging about the importance of stress tests to diagnose and monitor CAD, and empower patients to take action.

Mind Your Heart includes information about:

• Coronary artery disease
• Diagnosis and treatment
• Stress tests
• Heart healthy living
• Resources

It also invites site visitors to join the Mind Your Heart program for personalized information and support about CAD and a tailored doctor discussion guide.

In its first year, MYH beat the campaign’s goal for qualified leads. A study a year later yielded the following findings:

• Participants are pleased with the content and frequency of the information and resources provided by the Mind Your Heart program, and use it to assist them in understanding their condition.
• Respondents have a significantly increased knowledge of CAD and the importance of stress tests in diagnosing it.
• Two-thirds of respondents are very or extremely likely to recommend the MYH program to someone they know who is looking for information on CAD.
• Forty-two percent visited their health care practitioner after enrolling in the program.
• One out of five respondents have had a stress test since enrolling in the program.

We congratulate the team that collaborated on the winning effort.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.

How does a progressive, physician-led, multispecialty medical group, with nearly 400 physicians and midlevel providers, practicing in nearly 80 medical specialties and subspecialties, meet the online needs of nearly a million patients throughout the Central Illinois region?

Take a look at Springfield Clinic’s redesigned website and you’ll have a good idea.

The multifaceted interactive site takes top honors in the Best Website (Health System/Medical Group) category of Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

Among the factors that helped Springfield Clinic shine were its myHealth@SC portal, a secure, convenient way for patients to manage their personal health care and communicate directly with their doctors’ offices online; its Symptom Checker and other interactive tools; and its health library with videos, podcasts, quizzes, and more.

Among the goals for the redesigned site, which went live in November 2012, were a design and content that were more personal, patient-focused, and customer service-oriented, a simplified home page, and additional functions.

One of most impressive numbers Springfield Clinic has seen is in the way visitors access the mobile-friendly site. A Pew Internet study shows more than half of all smartphone owners use their mobile devices to access health information, a number that is sure to increase. In the relaunched website’s first six months, mobile usage increased more than 88 percent.

And that symptom checker? It’s the top viewed page in the site’s health library—one more indicator of the Pew statistic showing that patients who use the Internet get more than 70 percent of their health information online.

We congratulate the team that collaborated on the winning effort: Christy Broccardo, Courtney Enlow Hall, Kristin Fyans, Patty Kuhn, Emily Moore Adcock, Colby Roate, and Shelley Simon.

See the site here.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.

In its highly competitive Chicago market, Advocate Health Care was looking for a way to stand out. One way it could do so was to create a daily news site—a go-to source of health news and information for consumers, patients and their families, the news media, physicians, and associations.

The efforts paid off.

Its health enews news service earned Advocate Health Care top honors in the Best Website (Brand Journalism) category of Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

As it planned the daily news site, Advocate aimed for these goals:

• Boost Advocate’s position as the premier health care network in the competitive Midwest market.
• Increase the health system’s media visibility with stories and videos that feature its physicians, nurses, and other experts.
• Align with Advocate’s social media platforms to help build community engagement and interaction around health topics.
• Significantly increase Advocate’s online search visibility.

Advocate’s health enews “Share Team” launched its site in March, partnering with physician relations; teaming up with Healthe You, Advocate at Work, and the Advocate Charitable Foundation; and engaging with local and national reporters. More than 150 physicians and clinicians across the Advocate system serve as bloggers and experts and will be featured in videos and live Web chats. All Advocate associates opted in to the news site.

The Advocate health enews site includes a healthy mix of news stories, videos, and blog posts, with polls, inviting social media integration, and a link to its MyHealth Pal app.

Within two months of the site’s launch, it had nearly 34,000 subscribers and more than a half million page views. The Chicago Tribune, CNN, and other media outlets have picked up its stories.

If you didn’t understand brand journalism before, take a look at health enews. This site does it right.

We congratulate the health enews team on their winning effort!

Visit the site here.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.

Every Body Walk is Kaiser Permanente’s campaign to encourage the public to walk 30 minutes a day, five days a week.

To spread that message, it created QR codes to take advantage of the popularity of smartphones and directly reach its audiences to tout the benefits of walking.

Kaiser’s designers created a deck of four business cards for each channel. The cards collectively created a puzzle.

Since there were QR codes created for the campaign’s website and each of the social media channels used by the campaign, Kaiser could monitor and measure traffic to the site and social media engagement.

Website traffic increased 10 percent following the distribution of a deck of business cards featuring QR codes at targeted events. YouTube views jumped from 72,000 to more than 100,000 as a result of the QR codes. And, it picked up an additional 1,000 Twitter followers and 500 Facebook likes.

Those results won Kaiser Permanente top honors in the Best Use of QR Codes category of Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

We congratulate the team for their efforts.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.

When Medtronic Neurosurgery reorganized its sales team, it aimed to create an iPad app that would help sales pros, who were now a little less stratified, show everything they had to offer in an easy, understandable way, as well as give customers a way to virtually organize a hospital or operating room. They turned to The Optera Group for some real innovation.

The app the company ended up with did just that, by tossing out the grids and product pages and putting the products in a place that surgeons know intimately: operating rooms. Using photorealistic 3D technology, the company’s sales team is able to tell a story while showcasing products. Surgeons can get a real idea of how the equipment will be used.

For its approach, The Optera Group is the winner of the Best Mobile App category in Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

The Medtronic iNS iPad Application includes 500 screens of content, two software simulators, 20 interactive surgical-instrument trays, and 50 videos. About 70 percent of the company’s sales team has started using the app.

The app has also influenced internal communication within Medtronic. Presentations to executives now use 3D layouts similar to what’s in the app.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.

Many hospitals produce heartwarming videos to show how their nurses and physicians save lives.

Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children is no exception.

To show just how much the hospital can become a second home for children and their families during cancer treatment, the “Chloe’s Wedding Day” video came to life.

Chloe was diagnosed with a brain tumor on Christmas Eve at just 4 years old. Dr. Alex Levy, a pediatric oncologist/hematologist, treated her, and in the video, he shares the story of Chloe’s journey with childhood cancer.

Chloe’s family was so grateful for Dr. Levy’s giving their daughter a second chance at life, they invited him to walk her down the aisle when the time comes. This day, Dr. Levy says, “is the day I will retire.”

“Chloe’s Wedding Day” had more than 70,000 views within the first week and was picked up by 10 news stations nationwide.

It wins the prize for Best Marketing Video in Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.

Medical care isn’t just about diagnoses and drugs; most of the time it’s about people taking care of each other, in the hospital and at home. The Nebraska Medical Center’s “Peace and Love” video makes that clear in a story about the relationship between a 17-year-old patient and a hospital housekeeper named Peace. It’s a moving piece, and an award-winning one, taking top honors for Best Interview Video in Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

Jordan Cook was diagnosed with aplastic anemia at the Nebraska Medical Center and faced the prospect of a bone marrow transplant to save her life. Even after receiving the transplant (her younger sister was a match), she had to endure months of difficult chemotherapy.

Fortunately, she found Peace—or rather, a hospital staff member named Peace Locoh found her in the Oncology Hematology Special Care Unit. The two quickly became close friends and formed a bond that lasted even when she moved out of the Special Care Unit into a private room, and then back home. As the video closes, Jordan talks about visiting Peace’s home country of Togo in West Africa.

The video, available on YouTube, has more than 600 views. It takes only about five minutes to watch, but most viewers will remember it much longer than that. The Nebraska Medical Center’s Paul Baltes has told a moving story that puts NMC and its people in the best possible light.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.

The American Heart Association tackled an issue that’s literally a matter of life or death in its “Heart Attack vs. Cardiac Arrest” infographic. In addition to saving lives, the effort also won the AHA an award in the Best Infographic category of Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards
 
Do you know the difference between a heart attack and cardiac arrest? Although the terms are used almost interchangeably by many people, they’re different conditions with distinct symptoms, and they require specific treatments if lives are going to be saved. AHA’s goal was to increase awareness of these differences, as well as to deliver compelling and relevant content designed to enhance its social media presence and support AHA’s CPR & First Aid division as a valuable resource.

The resulting graphic clearly spells out the distinction between the two types of events: A cardiac arrest is an electrical malfunction in the heart; a heart attack occurs when blood flow to the heart gets blocked. Both can be deadly, but fast action in either case can prevent a tragic ending.

AHA’s infographic, the first in the series, was developed in-house by its internal design team and posted to the association’s CPR & First Aid Facebook and Twitter accounts. It was also posted to AHA’s national Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts and its own website for easy linking and distribution to field communications and sales teams (about 200 people).

Released in early March 2013, the infographic gathered more than 600,000 Facebook impressions within a few days, and had more than 5,000 shares. Within the month of March, AHA saw a 30 percent increase in likes on its CPR & First Aid Facebook page. AHA has received requests from field staff to create a printed version to share with customers, and has been asked to translate the piece into several languages for international use.

AHA’s Grant Schirpik, along with the association’s Communications Department, deserve credit for an effort that will inform people and potentially save thousands of lives.

For a look at the award-winning piece, click here.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.

The video opens with a bald kid in a hemoncology floor of Seattle Children’s Hospital lip-syncing to Kelly Clarkson’s song “Stronger.”

It moves on to other children—cancer victims—singing “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger.” And they’re dancing. Along with their doctors, nurses, and parents.

The poignant video—and an article about the cancer patient who made it—was just one of the posts that boosted Seattle Children’s Hospital’s On the Pulse to a tie for first place in the Best Blog (Health System/Medical Group) category of Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

Seattle Children’s came in neck and neck with nearby MultiCare Health System in Tacoma, Wash.

Clearly, medical organizations have gotten the message that their walls contain stirring stories of patients fighting for health (and life) and of medical staff giving them hope.

The Seattle Children’s blog deals with pediatric news, and is designed to be a resource for media, patients, and families. It offers health tips and perspective on current events, studies, and pediatric health news.

The blog is succeeding in its goal of securing media interest. A series of posts on sexual assault pegged to the Steubenville, Ohio, rape case, for example, resulted in a broadcast story and several online pieces, Seattle Children’s reports.

The “Stronger” video won 3,377,000 views on YouTube. The blog has also covered helping kids cope with violent events. Other hits included “The Cat Immersion Project,” “Five Days, Four Heart Transplants,” and “Breaking the Silence After Stillbirth: One Family’s Story.”

See the whole blog here.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.

A crash survivor reunites with those who saved her life. A soldier returns from Afghanistan to surprise his wife 15 minutes before the birth of his son.

And a gift from a preemie’s mother reminds parents they’re not alone.

The storytelling on MultiCare Vitals—a blog from MultiCare Health System in Tacoma, Wash.—boosted it into a first-place tie with Seattle Children’s Hospital for top honors in the Best Blog (Health System/Medical Group) category of Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

We’re recommending the two Pacific Northwest hospitals arrange a cage match to settle this properly—with doctors, of course, standing by.

MultiCare Vitals shows how organizations benefit by making education and storytelling (rather than marketing) their content priority. MultiCare hired journalists to write, edit, curate, and translate medical jargon for the rest of us.

It also uses a variety of other staffers as writers, among them doctors, registered nurses, dietitians, and even a groundskeeper who discussed the right time of year to prune your roses, the hospital reports.

MultiCare wins points for its savvy use of social media and for catching the attention of mainstream media through its blog, ranging from regional newspapers to the “Today” show.

MultiCare uses pictures of real staffers and patients, and even posts mini-articles about them. Rather than just selling, it has become a popular resource.

Besides, who can doubt their claims of search-engine know-how when they are writing stories such as “Why Do I Pee When I Sneeze?” This is one of the blog’s most-read pieces every month, thanks to traffic from Google.

In the past year readership has shot up by 300 percent, to more than 100,000, boosting the hospital’s combined Facebook communities to more than 21,000 people.

Visit the blog here.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.

Five cool ways voice recognition is working in health care. A money-saving alliance among 23 regional hospitals in Georgia.

And a story on a pricing trend that might rock the health care industry (or, then again, might not): a doctor-owned surgery center in Oklahoma that posts its prices on the Internet, luring patients from around the country.

All this is covered on Healthbiz Decoded, a blog sponsored by Xerox Healthcare Solutions. The combination of useful information and provocative topics makes it the winner of the Best Blog (Health Care Other) category in Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

The surgery center story, for example, contained this quote: “One man in Georgia needed a prostate operation and was billed $40,000 by the local hospital. Our price online was $3,600, so he showed a plane ticket to Oklahoma City, in one hand and our price list in the other hand to this hospital administrator and the administrator caved and said ‘we’ll do it for $4,000’ so we saved that guy $36,000 to get his surgery.”

But the story offers a counterpoint from a hospital CEO, who thinks the Sooner State pricing won’t have a wider impact because many hospitals are already losing money. Either way, the blog provides just the kind of information that those in the industry find essential.

This is a winner. In health care and other industries, we’re sure we’ll see more and more players following the content marketing path Xerox has taken.

Check out the blog here.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.

Connecting with clients is important in any industry.

When that connection has to do with one’s health, the importance is amplified.

No wonder Doner Advertising chose to make that the focus of a new effort for OhioHealth, the largest health system in central Ohio with eight hospitals, 42 care sites, and more than 22,000 physicians, associates, and volunteers.

Prior to 2011, OhioHealth marketed its services by individual hospitals and clinical programs. In January 2013, however, Doner launched the company’s “Believe in WE” campaign, which focused on what it refers to as the four “pillars of connectivity”:

1. Access
2. Continuum
3. Connected to each other
4. Connected to our patients

Through research conducted using six focus groups—including both OhioHealth and competitor loyalists—Doner learned “connectivity” was something that the health system could realistically claim in its market. Further, it was an idea that registered with the campaign’s target audience of health care consumers—specifically, the “Chief Wellness Officer” of the household who makes most of a family and/or home’s health care decisions.

Consisting first of print and radio, with television and digital both introduced by April, each of the pillars addressed core messages of OhioHealth. These included brand, heart and vascular, stroke, spine, cancer, and orthopedics.

Proving on target, OhioHealth.com averaged 6,247 visits per day, with the average mobile and tablet traffic up 60.4 percent compared to the same date range in 2012.

We, too, connected with Doner’s work for OhioHealth, and are proud to announce it as our selection for Best TV Advertising Campaign in Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

Congratulations.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.

Joy couldn’t be any more a befitting part of someone’s name than that of 3-year-old Emily.

A mere toddler, the courageous child was at the heart of an impactful and inspiring effort from Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children, and in more ways than one.

On July 5, 2012, Arnold Palmer Hospital opened the doors of its operating room to the online community as the hospital live-streamed the open-heart surgery of young Emily Joy. Through the hospital’s various social channels, two marketing team members documented her heart surgery in real time using their smartphones, uploading the photos to Instagram.

The photos were then pushed to the hospital’s Twitter feed and Facebook page, as well as on its children’s health care blog, Illuminate, which was updated every few minutes.

With a mere 14 Facebook posts, the live coverage captured more than 218,000 unique views and more than 19,500 engaged users. There were also more than 2,500 viewers tuned in to the blog.

PR Daily reported that Michael Schmidt, director of digital media at Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children and one of the photographers during the event, read only one negative comment, which said that the surgery was too graphic.

“There were literally thousands of comments encouraging the family and wishing the little girl well,” Schmidt says.

Not only did the project help to set Arnold Palmer Hospital apart as an innovator in blending the realms of digital media and health care, but at the end of it all, it captured the hearts of audiences while granting a new one to a very special little girl.

“The payoff for them is that some other family is going to see this and gain a better understanding of what their family is facing,” said Schmidt.

An added payoff for Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children is being named the winner in the Best Social Media Campaign category of Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

Congrats.

See the full campaign here.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.

The nurse house supervisor was on the Children’s Hospital Colorado media pager at 1 a.m. on Friday, July 20: “Someone shot up a movie theater. We’re ready for mass casualties,” she said.

At 12:30 that night, an individual had entered an Aurora, Colo., theater and begun shooting into a packed audience.

Nine minutes later, the gunman had killed 12 people and wounded another 70, “the most victims of any mass shooting in American history,” according to the CBS News website.

Children’s Hospital Colorado received six of the victims. Fortunately, its media team had written a crisis plan that leaned heavily on quick response to media requests and on social media:

• The first priority was internal communications and scripts for operators, security, staff, and hospital and foundation boards, along with social media response.
• The media team created a separate Communications Incident Command Center to discuss internal and external communication strategy, write messages, field media calls, set up interviews, and provide online content and social media presence. Emphasis was placed on the importance of contacting the media pager, and on a communications strategy regarding how to talk to kids about the tragedy.
• The first media team person on the scene served as PIO in the Incident Command Center.
• Each member of the media team had a 24/7 media pager.
• Three to five media relations experts responded to media requests in the first 72 hours.
• The team updated social media continually with advice to families about talking to children.
• Hospital security paged the media team each time a reporter stepped into the hospital.

Six weeks after the shooting, the media team had handled more than 250 media requests. Overall, 6,420 stories mentioned or included Children’s Hospital Colorado. The hospital’s own story posted to its website on how to talk to children about the shooting got 5,359 clicks. Its Facebook post on talking to children received 5,793 clicks and 195 shares (its most shared post to date).

For this speedy, nimble, in-depth media response to a terrifying tragedy, the media relations team at Children’s Hospital Colorado is the clear winner of the Best Response to a Crisis category in Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

The Children’s Hospital Colorado media team comprises Amanda Brannum, Robin Doerr, Natalie Goldstein, Melissa Vizcarra, and Elizabeth Whitehead. Congratulations!

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.