There are many great reasons why hospitals choose to work toward baby-friendly hospital status. There are also plenty of ways to encourage breastfeeding in line with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) guidelines, without having that official Baby-Friendly Hospital title.

Whether or not you’re pursuing baby-friendly status, your hospital can effectively support breastfeeding promotion among staff and patients. Here are 5 ways to go about it:

For some time now, health systems have been expected to use digital technology to manage a patient’s episode of care beyond the doctor’s office or hospital.

Harnessing the wealth of data on patient populations experiencing the same care episodes, digital health technology can connect providers with their patients safely, efficiently and on a large scale.

Best of all, providers can guide whole populations through their care in a way that feels extremely personal to patients.

This infographic offers some insight. 

Hospital executives and patient educators often ask me how patients—particularly younger ones—like to communicate with their doctors nowadays in the age of millennials and apps.

Patients are people and we need to engage them as such. Regardless of age or other factors, they use email and text all the time in their daily lives and want to communicate with their doctors, hospitals and physician practices through those channels too. 

Reaching your patients through the technology they already use is key to patient engagement and activation

With new tools like Snapchat and Boomerang popping up every day, sometimes it seems like communication technology seems to change faster than we can keep up with. That has led some hospitals to rush into creating an app or join the latest social media platform. Others continue to lag behind, using paper and telephone as the primary communication methods used to engage patients.

But some hospitals recognize that patients want to communicate the way they do in daily life. Email and text have an important place in patient-provider communication and remain patients' top choices for connecting with their doctors outside the medical office or hospital walls.

In fact, when it comes to improving health outcomes, your best bet for communicating with patients is a combined approach: mobile-responsive email and text.