Wellness Layers Inc. - Wellness Layers Media

PinnacleHealth Partners with Wellness Layers to Launch a New Patient-Centric Hospital Website

Harrisburg, PA - PinnacleHealth, the largest hospital system in Central Pennsylvania, and Wellness Layers, Inc., a leading provider of online and mobile health community portals, today announced a partnership to transform PinnacleHealth's website into a patient-centric, health 2.0 destination.

"We selected Wellness Layers because they're not the typical hospital web design company creating the same information laden sites," stated Joel Arker, Director of Strategic Technology Services at PinnacleHealth. "We are determined to offer our patients greater support and ease to provide the same great reception and care online as we do in the hospital".

The newly renovated website will implement Wellness Layers 'Me, We, Info' approach to patient engagement architecture: The 'Me' layer will allow patients to build a personal profile, and access their own medical records. The medical records access is done in cooperation with MobileMD, a Pennsylvania based HIE provider. The social component, the 'We' layer, will allow patients to interact via department specific discussion boards, send messages, comment on blogs, as well as recommend doctors. The features were selected to encourage patients to exchange ideas, share experiences and seek support through a secured online community. Lastly, the 'Info' layer will feed patients with highly personalized and relevant updates and information aggregated in a timely manner customized according to user profile, preferences, use, location, and interests as well as establishing micro-sites for key departments. PinnacleHealth Harrisburg, PA

"Our new site is a continuation and reflection of the passionate and exceptional care our staff provides our patients," stated Christina Persson, Director of Marketing at PinnacleHealth. "We'd like to cushion the experience with a friendly and supportive architecture to access our information."

"The goal is to create an online environment surrounding our patients' needs so that when they visit the site they'll think, wow, I can do that!?" explained Shelley Marshall-McCown, PinnacleHealth's Web Marketing Coordinator and one of the conceivers of the site revamp.

"We are impressed by the vision PinnacleHealth has for their new site and proud to be selected in building the value-rich online hospital experience. The new standard is being set for what patients can do, and will evolve very much like how consumers now choose their banks partially based on how much the online banking systems are seamlessly integrated and easy to use," Amir Kishon, PhD, CEO of Wellness Layers.

The newly designed PinnacleHealth site is expected to launch in the summer of 2011.

About PinnacleHealth

PinnacleHealth is the leading hospital and healthcare system in Central Pennsylvania, offering medical services such as maternity, neurology, cancer care, cardiac, surgery and imaging. As a non-profit organization located in Harrisburg PA, PinnacleHealth is dedicated to the health and wellness of the community we serve, having a long tradition of quality care dating back more than 130 years.

Health Care Social Media without Adverse Events

by Robert Hallock, VP Marketing

We now know that for Web engagement, it's smart to create solutions that are better when shared. However, sharing in health and wellness gives rise to concerns of privacy and being inundated with posts that require Adverse Event Reporting.

During the past several years, we have met with a number of pharmaceutical companies, and we typically hear the same thing. They love our approach, integrating three layers of personal plans ("Me"), community ("We") and personalized information ("Info"). However, today, pharma companies opt not to utilize social media platforms because of legal and regulatory implications that require Adverse Event Reporting. For the most part, even moderated communities are perceived to be unworkable. The pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments and their agencies are obviously frustrated with these constraints, but they see little in the way of alternatives.

In taking a closer look at the Web, there are many types of sharing that require no free user generated written content at all, such as ratings, responding to polls, and Facebook's famous 'Like' button. This led us to consider: How can we provide a community without consumers being able to freely communicate?

We finally concluded that we could redefine what "communication" can be. While pharma companies would not want to allow consumers to freely enter comments, this does not mean that they cannot communicate at all. So we worked backwards to re-define what communication would look like without the ability to freely enter comments.

We now have created a new social pharma platform, utilizing a "controlled community" whereby consumers can communicate with each other using a wide range of pre-defined verbal responses and emotions, to encourage feedback and support. This patent pending approach will allow and encourage consumers to establish personal pages, update their "friends," support their friends, find friends, establish groups/teams, receive rewards/badges, etc., all without the opportunity to freely share private information or post something that may need to be reported to the FDA.

The challenge, of course, is to make this controlled community as valuable, given its limitations, so that users in fact will continue to frequent the site. This is our challenge and our opportunity, and Wellness Layers is uniquely positioned to make this happen successfully and to highly customize each of our projects to our individual clients.

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