Cutting people open live! (NACHRI wrapup part 1)

I went to several sessions involving online health care and promotion at the NACHRI conference. It was really interesting to see what other hospitals are doing. As I have a lot to say, I’m going to break this up into multiple parts. Part one here is about Akron Children’s efforts with ORLive webcasting from the operating room. Other sessions will deal with the other sessions I went to including: incorporating blogging into your hospital site, hospital bedside interactive technology for education and entertainment, and ethnic media.

ORLive – webcasting from the operating room

Akron Children’s Hospital had a session on the live surgery video webcasts. Actually, they have a new webcast coming up on March 28th at 12:30pm entitled Horizontal Tenotomy: A Treatment for Congenital Nystagmus and if you miss it you can check their archives.

Their purpose behind the webcasts was to increase the image of Akron Children’s as a high tech institution and increase media exposure. Being so close to Rainbow Children’s. At $38k per webcast it seems like a high price to pay, but they have indications that they are getting results. They had a fairly high number of visitors, and more importantly they showed a large increase in ablation surgeries after they had a webcast ablation surgery. Of course it’s hard to disentangle these results from their other PR efforts. Still they seem to have accomplished what they wanted to get out of it, and it sure looks good on the front-page of their website. Speaking of which, they have a nicely redesigned site—I wish UCSF Children’s Hospital site was that nice looking and clear.

I don’t really see us at the Fetal Treatment Center doing webcasts. Personally, I think our short targeted educational videos are more effective since they are directly and quickly answering the questions that patient’s tend to ask. In contrast, their one hour long webcasts are more like tv programs that you have to set time aside to watch with no table of contents for skipping around. Supposedly they average a watch time of 20min, which I find amazing and a bit suspect with your typical new media short attention span. This feeling of television pervades the webcast medium as once it gets tossed in archives it feels old and sorta no longer useful.

Still webcasts and other longer videos have their place on the web. It might make sense to include some of our longer video productions online, which is something I should put some thought into.