Visit Aurora and Market Staging, Inc. Launch Destination Healthcare

This powerful new software platform creates a strategic partnership between destination marketing organizations (DMOs) and local healthcare facilities in order to directly reach members of a highly-targeted population seeking quality healthcare information online.

Employing a combination of Medicare patient data and user search-engine histories, Destination Healthcare allows Visit Aurora to target patients who could benefit from the specialty services offered at the city’s three world-class medical centers; University of Colorado Hospital, Children’s Hospital Colorado and The Medical Center of Aurora.

Visit Aurora began implementing Destination Healthcare on the physician page of its website during the summer of 2012. The data acquired by development partner, MSI – which had traditionally worked with hospitals looking to increase patient retention – identified a population of 2,500 patients in southwestern Colorado suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and receiving care at local facilities rather than at Aurora’s University of Colorado Hospital – which has a partnership with National Jewish Health, the top-ranked facility for COPD care in the United States.

“More and more, consumers are doing their research, and taking their medical care into their own hands,” said Visit Aurora president/CEO, Gary Wheat. “As a patient, if you learned that rather than receiving treatment at your local hospital; if you drove just a few hours further, you would have access to care at one of the top-ranked COPD facilities in the country. When given the choice, who wouldn’t make that decision?”

Utilizing this data, Visit Aurora and MSI deployed the first Destination Healthcare search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, resulting in a 600 percent increase in traffic to Visit Aurora’s physician website landing page in just 90 days. Additionally, the medical facilities listed on the page received more than 300 new patient inquiries.

For years, individual hospitals have tried to keep local patients local, rather than seeking treatment at nationally recognized facilities. For the first time, Destination Healthcare is able to harness the power of the specialties and high quality outcomes found at facilities throughout an entire destination, and promote those opportunities directly to the patients.

“Aurora is a warm and welcoming community,” continued Wheat. “But, we don’t have a national landmark and we don’t have the ocean. What we do have are well-established, highly-rated and world-respected medical facilities. Destination Healthcare gives us the tools to share that with the world.”

And, medical visitors can be a highly-desirable market segment for any DMO; they typically remain in the destination for an average of two to three weeks and travel with their family members, frequenting hotels, restaurants and shops. Additionally, medical visitors are not limited to any specific season; treatment is sought out year-round.

For more information on Aurora, Destination Healthcare, upcoming events or meeting facilities, visit www.VisitAurora.com or call 303-326-8698.