#HOWBLOGSHELP ONE #HOSPITAL'SPATIENTSGETHEALTHIER BY Jessica Levco

Hendricks Regional Health encourages its community and its employees to share stories about weight loss, exercise, and leading a salubrious lifestyle.

In launching its health blog community, Hendricks Regional Health set about building a story network.
"As a hospital, we're centered on supporting health and wellness in the community," says Carrie Meyer, the hospital's public relations coordinator. "We want to share personal experiences from our community and also share advice from our experts."
This network of storytellers comprises community bloggers, clinicians, and dieticians—all with the goal of sharing stories about fitness, nutrition, health, wellness, exercise, family, and relationships.
"A story network is more of a conversation of sharing and giving comments back to the author," Meyer says. "We didn't throw a bunch of blogs up there. We wanted people to be engaged and share feedback to the writer."
How the blog is structured
Recently, the Indiana-based hospital started a program called Great Shape, a six-month intensive program that helps people lead a healthy lifestyle and lose weight. It helps people manage chronic conditions, with the goal of reducing reliance on medications. Part of the requirement of joining the program is blogging about a healthy lifestyle to share it with others.
"It can help people achieve their goals, if they're accountable to others," Meyer says. "It can be really positive and helpful to them."
There are 12 contributors who each blog twice a month. In addition, there are 30 guest bloggers who send in posts. Meyer edits all the blogs and comments. When she edits, she said her goal is for the posts to be in the contributor's voice.
Patty Carrington, a hospital administrative secretary, completed the Great Shapes program and writes regularly for the blog. Meyer says "Patty Carrington" is one of the most popular search terms in the blog and that people love her posts. Here's an excerpt from one of her blogs:
I have my demons and my moments. I've been my own worst enemy. Last week, I noticed my reflection in Zumba class. I was just going to town in my amazing Yoga pants—dancing my booty off. OMG!!! I looked like a dancing California Raisin!!!! For a moment, it took my breath away and I felt hot tears stinging my eyes, but I kept dancing. You know what? I'm fine! Look at me go! Nothing is going to stop me any more! I've learned to pause, reflect, think and then conduct the emotional energy in the right direction. Great Shapes is the best program ever.
But the blogs are more than just about weight loss—they're about leading a more healthful lifestyle. Meyer shares the example of a blogger who was expecting her second child. When writing posts, she shared what she learned about managing her pregnancy from the hospital's physical therapist, lactation specialist, and dietician.
"It's not just about us being experts and telling people what to do," Meyer says. "We're trying to share personal experiences that we can all learn from."
Taking a look at blog analytics
The first blog post was published in January 2011. The Google Analytics account for the blog was set up that March. The first full month of use was April; during that time, there were 443 total visits. Recently, in February 2012, there were 1,747 visits. That's 394 percent growth, Meyer says.
A majority of the traffic is direct traffic (52 percent). Rounding out the top five traffic sources are Google, Hendricks.org, Feedburner (email subscribers), and Facebook. Bloggers share the blogs on their own social networks, too. In addition, the hospital publicizes the blogs on Hendricks.org, Facebook, and Twitter and in its e-newsletter.
"A goal for us right now is to increase our traffic from search engines by better optimizing content and blogs," Meyer says. "We also want to encourage visitors to subscribe; currently, we only have 26 subscribers."
Meyer touts the bounce rate as "very low," saying that "users dive deeper into the blog and read content before leaving.

"The bounce rate from the blog's home page for the time period of March 15, 2011 through March 15, 2012 is only 28.7 percent, well under the industry gold standard," Meyer says.