I recently co-authored an article with Raymond Urgo from Urgo Consulting called “Healthcare Industry Benefits from Policies and Procedures Software,” which was featured in the February 2012 issue of the award-winning newsletter The Policies and Procedures Authority.

The short article describes benefits of P&P management software such as control over style and templates; easy collaboration; automation; content sharing across health networks; reduced risk; and greater accountability among staff. To learn more about these benefits, click here and read the article.

To comment further, I would also stress that perhaps the biggest benefit of P&P management software is to the patient. We recently had a meeting here at PolicyStat to talk about our progress as a company in 2011. One of our greatest achievements was the number of people who are now using our product to look up and find policies, a number which has grown exponentially in the past year. This is reassuring from a customer satisfaction standpoint because it demonstrates the comfort level our customers have with our product. To me, that number is a testament to the great strides our industry is making to patient safety and quality of care. Staff members could not efficiently look up that number of policies before P&P technology; policy lookups that now take seconds with P&P technology had previously taken several minutes using a home grown/shared drive system that lacked robust search functionality – time that could have been spent providing care to the patient. Alternatively, without P&P technology the staff member might not even have consulted the policy at all due to time sensitivity, choosing to ask someone else who may or may not have the most accurate information. When staff members use P&P management software to its fullest, patients receive care based on the most accurate, up-to-date information.

The future is bright for the healthcare industry, and we look forward to providing more healthcare facilities with the best P&P management software available today.

It’s a new year with new beginnings, so we thought we would start the year off right with an office move. Your policy and procedure management headquarters is now located at the following address:

12800 N Meridian St, Suite 125, Carmel, IN 46032

The new office will accommodate our growing implementation team. They work hard to get your policies and procedures up and running quickly with minimal effort on your part, so your vital information is organized and accurate.

In the Carmel area and want to chat? Stop on by! We would love to see you, whether you want to talk policies or just say hi. To get here from Meridian/US31, turn west onto W Carmel Drive, take the first exit on the roundabout and then the first right into the parking lot. Our office is down the hallway to the left. See you soon!

In the spirit of football season and the coming Super Bowl here in Indianapolis (woot woot!), we started a company-wide "fantasy SEO league" at PolicyStat. It’s like fantasy football, except this game is based on how well your team’s keyword does in the search engines – not how well your player performs on the field. Instead of keeping track of yards, we track how many website hits/leads each team’s chosen keyword generates for the website. We thought it would be a fun game to get all employees involved in SEO (search engine optimization), whether they choose to participate a lot or a little.

Goals of the game:

1. Improve rankings for our company’s newly targeted keywords.
2. Increase our website’s domain authority.
3. Help people understand the SEO/backlink process and why it’s a company-wide mission.
4. Create a fun – not forceful – game that also helps the company.

Incentives to play:

• A $5 Starbucks gift card for each successful backlink acquired, which will in turn help your team’s keyword performance
• A traveling trophy with the winning team’s name engraved

Ready to start a league at your company? Here’s how!

1. Choose the keywords you want to use in the game. These will be the keywords which are already on-page optimized on your website. On-page optimization is a pre-requisite to the game, because you can’t rank for keywords if Google doesn’t know which keywords you are targeting.
2. Start tracking your keyword rankings in AuthorityLabs. This is optional for the game – rankings don’t matter for scoring, but it’s a good way to gauge why you are or are not getting many clicks with certain keywords.
3. Set up a custom report to track keyword clicks and goals in Google Analytics. You’ll want click on "New Custom Report" in the "Custom Reporting" tab. Use "Unique Visitors" as the metric and "Keyword" and/or your goal completion as the dimension(s). Add the necessary filters, then "Add to Dashboard" so you can easily see the report each time you log in. This will make it easy to count number of visitors coming in on each keyword.
4. Create weekly match-ups using the round-robin system. First assign each team (we did teams of two) a number and then use algorithm to build a schedule for as many weeks as you’d like to play.
5. Lay out the rules to your employees and get started!

I’ve posted the complete set of rules so feel free to link to them. You might have modifications yourself, as these "rules" contain lots of explanations for non-SEO people. It would be exciting to try this with an actual SEO company and see what participation it brings for people who have even more motivation.

A few fun modifications to consider:

• Try different incentives and prizes – let weekly winners wear their favorite jerseys on Monday. Make the big prize a Snuggie with their logo of choice (I was told by a man that this was not a real incentive because "men are always hot.") Make the boss get a tattoo for reaching a certain goal. Be creative!

• Give higher incentives for do-follow links – we didn’t introduce the idea to people because they were just learning what anchor text was, and there are only be a few people in the company who would even use blog commenting as a tactic.
• Reward people for social media participation – this one’s tricky and we didn’t come up with a way to measure it just yet. But in the first week of the draft, one of our employees had our website tweeted out by a friend with 28,000+ followers. That should count for something, right?
• Hold the competition every "season" – We’re planning on doing this ourselves. Ideally, employees will have a better understanding of how backlinks help their keyword’s performance, which makes the game better and more fun to play each season. You can also use this opportunity to target new keywords should they change.

Good luck to everyone who plans on trying this, and do comment on this post to let me know how/if it works out for you and any modifications you tried. Please link back to this post if you like it… after all, that is the goal of our game. Also, I would get lots of free coffee ;)

Lastly, being a Ball State grad writing a sports-centric post, I feel obligated to conclude with "AND BOOM GOES THE DYNAMITE!"