PokenHEALTH and Standard Register Healthcare announce NFC partnership

Poken and Standard Register Healthcare announce NFC products and services platform pokenHEALTH

Swiss based Poken and Standard Register Healthcare of Dayton, Ohio have got together to add some NFC pizzazz to healthcare in the form of pokenHEALTH. At first glance you may wonder what an NFC marketing company can do for healthcare, and we have to admit you are not alone. But when you learn the details it makes a little more sense. Standard Register Healthcare will use the system to exclusively market its healthcare services in North America, using NFC and social media engagement to educate consumers about the firm’s offerings.

“This exclusive relationship brings together Poken’s market leadership in real-world, social media with our healthcare expertise to offer clients an unprecedented way to transform events, build stronger connections with their stakeholders and truly differentiate their brand,” said Scott Wallace, Vice President of Strategic Development for Standard Register Healthcare, a business unit of Standard Register that serves 62% of U.S. hospitals.

“Together, we have the opportunity to transform events and help hospitals create connections with people that are fun and memorable,” said Stéphane Doutriaux, Founder & CEO of Poken. “Our platform caters to these needs, while providing a secure and confidential platform for continued interaction.”

Poken is known for bringing social experiences offline, and its partnership with Standard Register Healthcare plays to these strengths.

The pokenHEALTH platform and services that Standard Register Healthcare will use

The pokenHEATH platform enables marketers with interactive touch-based marketing tools to manage professional events and community. Poken is known for not only building software solutions, but for also adding its own flavor of hardware. If you have heard of Poken before, you may know that the company produced pokenTAGS which it utilized in its partnership with Nokia to disseminate. pokenHEALTH uses these same types of NFC devices that will also interact with NFC smartphones, NFC tags and have access to the whole NFC ecosystem that Poken has created.

Poken says that no personal information is ever disclosed, or what it calls PII (Personal Identifiable Information), and here’s another industry buzz word for you to learn – PHI (Protected Health Information) is exchanged. In fact, the only thing that is exchanged is unique personal metadata which is uploaded to a user’s private online hub. This allows a user to view people and information that has been collected at an event. The system works on the basis of proximity and the benefit for users is that their private hub stays active long after an event has finished, which allows sponsors to nurture connections. So in other words, pokenHEALTH is an offline / online social platform that uses NFC to connect people, forms a informational and registers guests at events. Those guests can interact with each other after the event has finished.

Meeting participants can interact with each other and the sponsor. Users can collect and share contact information, event materials and other resources. Data is wirelessly and instantly sent from one device to the other based on the proximity of their keychain devices or smartphones, says Poken.

“What makes pokenHEALTH great is not the Poken technology alone, but the user experience. The consumer interface is amazingly intuitive, colorful and engaging – something you rarely see in healthcare today. This marks the first milestone with our friends in Switzerland. Every day, we think of new ways it could be used to transform interactions within healthcare,” said Yeva Roberts, Emerging Technology Strategist for Standard Register Healthcare.

“The introduction of this new suite of products and services is a natural extension of our strategy. It has the power to enhance the meeting experience and help our customers elevate their brand and advance their reputation,” Wallace added.

Poken NFC based marketing and social platform summary

Although pokenHEALTH is obviously aimed at the healthcare market, and more specifically at conferences and trade shows, in theory the system is built for any industry. Sharing contact information, social networks and brochures and collateral is not limited to healthcare in any way. The Poken system would work just as well at WIMA or NFC Payments USA, which are both coming up soon. The Poken system has Pokens, which are small key ring type devices, and then there are Poken cards. Users can either touch a display unit to collect collateral or touch them with another user’s Poken device to collect contact and social information. As you will see in the video, the Poken platform also supports the company’s apps, which allows you to grab contacts straight on your phone.

This may have been released as a solution to the lucrative healthcare market but it works for any situation or event where you have people together who may want to reconnect or learn more about products and services in their own time. We like Poken’s approach, we just wish they would market it as broadly as it deserves.