Location data management company Yext, which launched a healthcare-specific service less than four months ago, has announced an updated platform, integrations with major physician finder services and the hiring of a leader for its healthcare operations.
Marc Ferrentino, executive vice president of strategy for the New York City-based company, called the newly introduced Yext Healthcare Location Cloud “V 2.0” of Yext for Healthcare. The vendor formally entered the healthcare business in April.
Carrie Liken
Thursday, the company announced it had hired health policy veteran Carrie Liken, formerly of Google, to run Yext for Healthcare.
“Healthcare is inherently local, so the rise of mobile has dramatically changed the patient journey,” Liken said in a company statement. “Innovations like today’s announcement are just the beginning of where the Healthcare Location Cloud is headed, and of how we will help healthcare systems face the location data crisis and navigate the changing informational landscape.”
The Healthcare Location Cloud helps healthcare providers keep office, facility and physician location information up to date across numerous directories, including Internet search engines. This includes listing the offices individual doctors will be at on any given day of the week.
“Having your facility information correct is very important,” Ferrentino said. “Having your physician data correct is equally important.”
For this reason, Yext has assembled what Ferrentino called a “coalition of the willing” among healthcare publishers. This group includes Vitals, Wellness.com, BetterDoctor, EZDoctor, Docspot, UCompareHealthCare and DrScore.
“As we collect physician information, we are then pushing that information to those publishers,” Ferrentino said. The publishers made application programming interfaces available to Yext, which then built interfaces to each service, according to Ferrentino.
The Healthcare Location Cloud necessitated Yext updating its platform to support various physician data points: each doctor’s national provider ID number, education and training, office locations, insurance plans they accept and whether they are taking new patients.
“When you buy the Yext service, you can opt for the physician service in the location cloud,” Ferrentino said.
For healthcare providers, this can serve as a marketing tool. One early Healthcare Location Cloud customer is Steward Health Care System in Boston.
When Steward hires a new physician, for example, Yext collects that doctor’s pertinent information and then pushes the data to its publisher partners.
“Yext solved a bet-your-business problem for us, which was, ‘How do you connect services with customers?’ Buying a physician practice with up to 100 doctors is a big investment. We could see through our website traffic that we were having difficulty getting the right patients to the right physicians,” Steward Chief Marketing Officer Brian Carty said in a Yext press release. “Yext seemed to have this problem figured out really well.”
Photos: Yext
