We’ve been hard at work and we’ve rolled out a lot of changes in the past month to myhealthcaresource.  New states have been coming online steadily and we’re beginning the process of updating  the current data to 2008 as it becomes available.  We’re happy and excited to see users coming back regularly and finding our data and services useful.  We’ve done a little bit of cleanup, but most of our changes were content or functional aspects of the site.

Site Updates:

Trial System

We have changed our free trial system to a credit-based system instead of a time-based one.  Previously, users could sign up and browse our data sets freely for seven days.  We felt that this gave potential customers the best example of what we are offering.  Now, when users first sign up, they receive five credits to view facility reports and two credits to view state-wide analysis reports.  We find that new users spend more time with each report and hopefully have a better understanding of what data and tools are available.  We found that with a time-based system, new users were focused on looking at many facilities briefly, instead of delving deeper into a single facility’s data.

Free Previews

We understand that our users are busy and we want to provide the easiest and quickest way for you to determine what we’re about.  In the past, users had to sign up for at least a trial before being allowed to view any of our data.  This was typically to prevent abuse and to keep track of free trial usage.  We are now periodically rotating free facility and state-wide analysis reports on the front page.  These are actual reports that we have removed the sign up restriction on temporarily.  A new visitor to myhealthcaresource can now view samples from any of the state’s we have available with a single click.

Homepage Content

The data we provide has a very specific audience of health care professionals dealing with facility finances and operations.  Initially we hoped that we could “sell” users on the usefulness of our data and services even if they had no previous experience with it.  We thought focusing on these users would help us create and intuitive interface that also allowed experts to get the data they needed as well.  The result, though, was a very positive response from those already working with this data, and confusion or indifference to those that didn’t understand.  We realized that we need to focus on the users that already need our services instead of attempting to convert others.  Our homepage now reflects this with new content focusing on exactly what data we are offering.  In the future, our goal will be to provide CPAs, CFOs, owners, and others dealing with facility finances the tools and data they need to do their job more informed and efficiently.

Search Engines

As search engines crawl through our data, people are now starting to find our site through Google or Bing by searching for their own name or company name.  The number of people finding us this way has been growing steadily for the past few months.  We decided that we needed to give these potential users an example immediately upon arriving at the site.  When users are referred from Google or Bing we allow them to view the page they were searching for, even if it requires logging in.  There is a max of 3 views to reduce abuse. We hope that this helps users searching for medicaid cost report information find what they’re looking for.

How To Section

We also removed the how to section because it no longer reflected the new data that has been added to the site.  We will be reworking this to add back in the future with video examples to help people see how to manipulate the data on the site.

Thanks!

We hope that our users will continue to provide feedback about the data and the site’s interface.  There are more exciting improvements in the pipeline that will be out in the next few months.

The Myhealthcaresource.com Team