Hospitals continue to expand their presence out to the web with information sites. Patients can now find maps, contacts and general data with a few mouse clicks. Some are expanding into blogs as well. One could consider this a really excellent beginning. In fact, it's a great base to build on.

Many healthcare facilities show at least some video content. Often, it provides information about the facility, gives overviews of various health conditions, or gives tips on how to stay healthy. However, thats not all that video services for healthcare can do for doctors, patients, and healthcare establishments.

Whether you are new to email marketing or have mastered its value in the past, adding or tweaking the use of video in your email marketing will greatly increase participation of customers at every level of the funnel. It is now incontrovertible that video email marketing increases sales. Consider these recent stats regarding video on its own; over a twelve-month period, media containing video is shown to generate six times as many click- throughs than that media with out video. Online video viewing has now surpassed television viewing, 84% to 83%. When looking at social media content, video views is the number one type of social content consumed and upon realizing that social media is growing 8x (times) faster than any other online media, this is huge. Traditional email marketing is no longer efficacious.

We all know about many different kinds of businesses using social media from stores to social justice organizations but hospitals have also jumped on the bandwagon. There are many reasons for hospitals using social media, but here are four great reasons why.

Time spent waiting is wasted time. This feeling is especially prominent for people waiting in hospitals, whether in an on-site doctor's office, the emergency room, or even in the hospital itself. The combination of the seriousness of the visit and the lack of entertainment work together to make it so that people want only one thing: out. Fortunately, there is something healthcare facilities can do to alleviate the sensation of waiting, while providing important information for patients and those waiting along with them: They can provide videos with relevant health information.

Many hospitals and clinics believe that their patients don't care about much aside from the doctor and staff they interact with, but this isn't an accurate perception. In reality, patients choose a healthcare facility the same way they choose to shop at a typical retail store. The overall impression of the establishment, the experience of waiting for service, and how well they understand the processes they go through, all play a part in whether they will come in and whether they will return. Therefore, it's a good idea for healthcare operations to think of the entire customer experience rather than to focus solely on what happens inside of the examination room.

Just because someone jumps into the water, doesn’t mean they can swim. Many hospitals are figuratively doing just that, and finding out that there’s more to the social media ocean than what appears on the surface. There are, however, specific things that hospitals can do to successfully utilize social media in reaching distant lands of opportunity.

According to a recent study, most hospitals already have social accounts; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Even YouTube has swelled the ranks with at least half of the institutions polled.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that these platforms are being used to their full capabilities. In fact, according to professors from the University of Virginia and MIT, hospitals are commonly underutilizing social media, even heading in the wrong direction.

While the old train of thought was to keep customers in your store longer to increase a chance of purchase, a keen observer of how their business works will notice that isn't always true. Often it's more a case of the customers speed in moving through a store. In that area, selecting the right overhead business music can help you make the customers experience more efficient without sales decreasing.

Some hospitals have begun using video and digital signs as ways to educate and inform patients and their families. In October of 2014, Region Hovedstaden, the regional healthcare authority of Copenhagen, Denmark, began the process of installing 500 digital screens in 20 different medical facilities. The screens will be installed in waiting areas in the facilities and will offer educational and informational health-care related content.