Why We Started Ginkgo

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Ginkgo Healthcare has been years in the making. Our partners have extensive experience in healthcare, education, and business, and they share a common goal – to make a difference in people's lives through healthcare and health education.

The idea of helping hospitals develop, manage, and improve their healthcare quality websites was born when Helen worked on a year-long quality improvement project with Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. The project was, while rewarding, also difficult, expensive, and time consuming. And the process of implementing and updating the site was plagued with bugs. Colleagues lamented that there must be an easier way, and that got her thinking. And after working on every aspect of the quality website over more than a year, she came up with an idea. Soon after, Ginkgo Healthcare began to take shape.

Quality Improvement Through Education

After market research that included speaking with both consumers and healthcare professionals, the team at Ginkgo knew that offering robust quality websites wasn't enough. To truly have an effect on outcomes and to positively influence patient behavior, education had to be at the forefront.

Studies of patient behavior as it relates to healthcare outcomes show time and time again that informed, engaged patients tend to have better outcomes. It's also true that happier, more satisfied patients often fare better. But the question still remains: What is the best way to educate patients?

We may not have the answer, but we do have some answers.

Through excellence in health education, the number of people who can be reached – and helped – is almost limitless. Using our medically accurate healthcare content and interactive, engaging websites, video, webinars, and health-related classes, your website can not only drive traffic to your hospital, but also truly help people.

We understand that when education is delivered to the people who need it most, through mediums they use and trust, with appropriate cultural context, it can be transformative. And that's why we do what we do.

Innovations in Health Education

Three of our managers, plus a group of our consultants, have backgrounds in developing educational content to be delivered outside of the traditional classroom. This experience has been invaluable as we've developed educational material and classes for a healthcare audience that includes patients, general consumers, and healthcare professionals.

In addition to existing material that can be private-labeled if desired, we work with our clients to create online education about anything they can imagine. Do you want to reach more people with smoking cessation classes that work? How about increasing awareness about symptoms of ovarian cancer, diabetes, heart disease, or COPD? If you want to provide hospital-wide training, we can develop that for you too.

Whether you need to develop or improve healthcare education or delivery or you want to drive quality improvement initiatives, we can help.

Focus on Patient Satisfaction

At Ginkgo, we understand the importance of patient satisfaction, but we also understand that providing the best possible care doesn't always lead to satisfied patients – at least not to patients who will give 9s and 10s across the board on HCHAPS surveys. We know you must strike a balance between giving patients what they want and treating them as you know you should.

We will partner with you to find solutions that work best for your patients and your staff, helping you improve not only your patient satisfaction scores, but also your healthcare outcomes.