Yext, an established company in location data management, is formally entering the healthcare industry Wednesday.
The new Yext For Healthcare service, built into the existing Yext location management software, helps standardize facility, office and physician location data across multiple online platforms, including public websites, search engines, maps and apps. “This is really about improving the patient experience,” said Marc Ferrentino, executive vice president of strategy for New York City-based Yext.
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It’s also about improving branding and marketing by driving people to healthcare organizations. Yext’s own research uncovered a serious “location data crisis” in healthcare.
An analysis of data on 1,800 physicians and healthcare facilities found that 31.5 percent of those providers did not have a listing in any local online directory — 3.6 times the rate of the general business population. “They’re just not on the Internet,” Ferrentino said. That’s astounding in 2016.
Furthermore, nearly half of the listings had the wrong addresses and 29 percent had inaccurate phone numbers, Yext reported. “For us, it’s really about awareness of the problem and awareness that there is a solution,” Ferrentino said.
The company decided to release a healthcare-specific offering after seeing a spike in the number of leads it was getting from healthcare systems about 6-7 months ago, according to Ferrentino. He saw three trends:
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- The consolidation of providers often causes changes in addresses, phone numbers and websites. Yext tries to detect and manage these changes in as close to real time as possible. “You see a lot of doctors moving between health systems, particularly high-profile physicians,” Ferrentino said. He likened an incorrect listing for an in-demand doctor to LeBron James walking around Cleveland wearing a jersey from his former team, the Miami Heat.
- Internet search is a major driver in consumers looking for doctors, hospitals and other healthcare facilities. “One of the things we do, we focus very much on local search,” Ferrentino said.
- Healthcare systems are heavily marketing their brands. “They want to have as many touch points as possible in terms of SEO,” Ferrentino said.
He noted that search engines, particularly Google, reward content that is consistent and that has multiple points of signal across the Internet. Yext has forged direct connection with dozens of Web publishers, including what Ferrentino called the “big six” for brand marketing: Yelp, Apple, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Bing. Ferrentino said that Yext holds four patents related to direct integration with these platforms.
Photos: Yext, Bigstock
