Vital Springs Technologies, Taking Healthcare to the Next Level

Vital Spring Technologies is the first enterprise technology company to deliver business intelligence solutions that enable large, self-insured corporations, government agencies, payers, hospitals and providers to better manage and control healthcare costs and quality. Founded in 1999, Vital Spring Technologies creates software for employers to manage health benefits and improve the cost and quality of healthcare delivery. It is the only technology platform that finally links everything from the employer to the doctor and everyone in between.

The founder and CEO of the company, Sreedhar Potarazu, M.D., MBA, regarded as one of the leading authorities on the business of health and technology is the man behind this new road of innovation for technology. He is the author of the book, “Get Off the Dime: The Secret of Who Changing Who Pays for Your Healthcare”, now sold on Amazon.com and most major bookstores. ”Get off the Dime” provides the blueprint for how corporate America and the workforce can together turn the tide to get better healthcare for all. Time Magazine has praised it as “an informative, must-read for anyone interested in taking corporate health care to the next level by better serving employees and saving money.”

Dr. Sreedhar has also been a regular guest speaker on Fox News Channel to give his take on healthcare issues (click here to view video clips). Furthermore, his article is published online at Washington Post where he discusses how employers, not the government, can control and therefore improve healthcare by using technology to empower the purchaser with the right data.

Trivision Studios and Dr. Sreedhar’s relationship began back in 2004 when TriVision provided video production services for the company.From there on, TriVision became the source for all of Vital Spring Technologies’ video, photography, printing, and design needs. From designing and producing numerous marketing literature and collaterals, such as pamphlets, postcards, sells sheets, bus signage, as well as the cover of his best-selling book "Get Off the Dime", to producing marketing video pieces, TriVision has worked with Dr. Sreedhar and his company every step of the way to pave the way for a successful enterprise.

To read more about Dr. Sreedhar’s path to success and how Vital Spring Technologies has made an impact on the management of healthcare, please visit their website on www.vitalspring.com. To read about his best-selling book “Get Off the Dime”, please visit www.getoffthedimenow.com.

Winkler Centers, DC Area’s Premier Total Dentist Solution Provider

For over a decade, TriVision Studios has been the one-stop marketing, design and print source for Winkler Centers for Sedation Dentistry, one of the premier sedation and anesthesia dentistry clinics in the Washington DC Metropolitan region. Providing specialized services for the high-fear and time-limited patients, Dr. Thomas Winkler, DDS has changed people’s lives one smile at a time for over 20 years and is regarded as "The Voice of Sedation Dentistry" in the DC area. Heard regularly on local radio commercials, Dr. Winkler is the "Total Dentist Solution Provider" and one of the first dentists to implement the "Teeth in a Day" concept.

Throughout the years, TriVision Studios has provided various services for Dr. Winkler, from branding and building a corporate image for his practice, to designing and printing marketing materials and promotional items, providing photography, video and web services, and now leading his online marketing campaign.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a big part of this online marketing effort with the goal to increase the dentistry’s rankingin online search engines. In addition, TriVision is leading the dentistry’s social media marketing.

To visit Winkler Centers for Sedation Dentistry online, please visit www.winklersedation.com, developed and maintained by TriVision Studios. To become a fan of Winkler Center for Sedation Dentistry on Facebook, click here.

Measure the Web Like TV, and Brand Advertising Will Follow

by Michael Zimbalist, Courtesy of Adage.com
Published: February 22, 2010

How ironic it is that the internet -- our most-measurable medium -- has developed inadequate measurement systems that are reviled by publishers and marketers alike.

The web changes at lightning speed, but online advertising remains stuck with the same old metrics we've had since the beginning. "Unique visitors," or 30-day cumulative reach, holds firm as the audience measure. The currency for buying and selling continues to be "ad impressions," which are generally disconnected from any meaningful audience dimensions. Worst of all, the reigning metrics for campaign efficacy are all tied to observable outcomes, as is typified by the dreaded "click-through rate­."

Outcome-based measures completely ignore the very real and powerful ability of advertising not just to change people's behavior, but to change people's minds. Indeed, much of what we call online advertising isn't really advertising at all -- it's direct marketing.

Fortunately, there is a way for us to break out of this direct-response ghetto and demonstrate the power of the web as a true advertising medium. The key is to measure web audiences in the same way that TV audiences are measured -- gross rating points, or GRPs. Such a move would provide brand advertisers with a comparable metric to evaluate their media buys across TV and the web. It would provide proof that online display, bought with sufficient reach and frequency, can be as effective as TV at moving brand health measures and cross-channel sales volumetrics.

The downside for publishers is that our audiences will look a lot smaller than they do under the prevailing system. But let's face it: "unique users," calculated on a 30-day basis, is a pretty meaningless measure. To be counted as part of a website's audience, all a person needs dois view a single page once a month. It matters not whether the page is viewed for an instant or for an hour. It doesn't even matter whether the page contains any advertising! If broadcast networks used a comparable metric and reported the number ­­­of viewers who surfed past their channel once each month, they would all have roughly the same audience and it would be roughly equal to everyone in the U.S.

Thirty-day cumulative reach was a brilliant strategic choice as the original online audience measure. When the web made its commercial debut in the mid '90s, the user base was understandably quite small. Media buying, based on reach, was a well-established practice, so it made sense to exaggerate the size of our new medium by choosing a long duration over which to measure the audience. Each year, as more consumers became hooked on the net, websites drew hockey-stick charts showing the dizzying growth of their unique users. This created a feel-good mania that worked for everyone. Investors felt secure that their venture capital was being put to good use, mainstream- media companies took pride in their precocious digital progeny, and media buyers, for whom the metric was originally established, had a rudimentary method to rank sites based on their reach.

A lot has changed in the past 15 years. The web has become pervasive. Consumers use it all day long -- at work, at home and on the go. As a result, the audience by day part, in aggregate, now has sufficient weight to compete favorably head-to-head with TV. The time has come for the web GRP.

Online publishers are often evaluated (and compensated) not so much for the audiences they reach as for the results they deliver. Adopting the web GRP would help correct this situation, because it would provide a method to unify the planning currency (reach) with the buying currency (impressions). The current disconnect between planning and buying is a vestige of our original choice of audience metric, and stands as a major reason that online-advertising efficacy has been judged almost exclusively by direct-response metrics.

The advent of behavioral targeting has helped buyers begin to make the connection between the impressions they buy and the users they reach and helped move the industry in the direction of selling audiences.

This is a positive development, but the method by which behavioral segments are constructed relies principally on inferring the intention of users based on keywords they search for or pages they view. This approach has two serious limitations. First, it minimizes the opportunity for individual publishers to deliver segments of sufficient scale within their own sites, thereby pushing advertisers into the arms of multisite aggregators such as Google. Second and more importantly, behavioral segments based solely on inferred user intent keeps the microscope of online-advertising effectiveness focused on the bottom of the marketing funnel, ignoring the very real role that display advertising plays in demand generation.

Demand creation happens at the top of the marketing funnel when brilliant creative ideas are coupled with the tactical buying of reach and frequency, broadly targeted. Advertisers buy the audiences they plan for, and media owners are paid for delivery of those audiences. If we adopt the web GRP as the standard for measuring online audiences, we will be able to clearly demonstrate that online is as effective at the top of the funnel as it is at the bottom. When we do, online advertising will attract the branding dollars that have largely eluded the marketplace thus far.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Zimbalist is VP-research and development operations for The New York Times and tweets at twitter.com/zimbalist. Story courtesy of AdAge.com. Published: February 22, 2010