It’s not often that you’ll find us using this blog for anything remotely related to blatant self-promotion, so we’re not going to swerve from that to do so here (well, not much at least), but I did want to take a few lines of text to highlight that the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) has selected several best practices / thought leadership whitepapers for publication from amongst hundreds of offerings from its member companies.

Engage is excited to announce that two of its white papers have been selected for publication by TAG’s Health Society. For our team, this is a milestone in its Healthcare IT practice, so I wanted to specifically note the achievement. Congratulations especially goes to Heather Shankwiler, Andrew Swerlick and Virginia Melton for their achievement.

Both of Engage’s accepted whitepapers take a look at the promise that technology holds for healthcare, and where technological revolutions have a real chance to drive ROI and service improvements for healthcare providers. Summaries for the whitepapers are below, and you can look forward to some blog posts in the coming days that will offer some more analysis and thoughts on these subjects.

Partner and Patient Self Service

Healthcare providers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand there’s a costly labor shortage, on the other, there are consumers sick of high health care prices. Going forward, the successful health care providers will be the ones who improve health care efficiency to navigate these two forces. This is the only way they can ensure the high quality and low cost needed to win over increasingly informed consumers.

There is great potential for building this efficiency through process automation and self service portals. And even more importantly, self service meets the customers expectations about how health care should function in a Web 2.0 world. A decrease in cost here can actually lead to significant increases in quality.

Similarly, the automation of mundane tasks frees up qualified health care staff to focus on higher return activities, and ensuring they have more time to do other parts of their job. This additional time leads to higher quality work and morale for those hard to find health care professionals, making hiring and retention easier.

For those health care organizations with a small staff and budget, these sort of technological tools are a potentially powerful resource to weather the continuing storm of labor shortages and increased demand that the health care industry suffers from.

Fulfilling the