By: Ben Dillon, Corporate Evangelist, Geonetric Increasingly, health consumers visit hospital Web sites before visiting the hospital, making your Web site one of your most important relationship-building tools. If your site does not meet their needs, you risk losing them as potential patients. Consider the visitor who searches your site for cancer, not oncology, and cannot find what they need, or the potential donor who clicks through your site only to learn that she cannot donate online. Sites that make it difficult for visitors to accomplish their tasks leave them with an impression of your organization that likely does not reflect the image you wish to portray. As you maintain your site, keep your site visitors in mind. Online healthcare seems to center on technology—comprehensive EMRs, CPOE, and clinical decision support—but these technologies tend to focus on the needs of the healthcare professionals rather than health consumers. The Value of Patient Focus
Patient-focused Web sites become powerful representations of your brand and a key tool for building relationships. 1. Health consumers want to work with you online. They are managing all other aspects of their life online, from their finances to their travel. 2. Your site can be a competitive differentiator. Health consumers are drawn to providers when they are easy to work with. The web offers opportunities to be easier to work with than your competition, influencing consumer preference. Effectively focusing on the patient will deliver significant value in terms of brand preference, brand loyalty and downstream revenue for your organization. How to Implement a Patient-Centric Approach
Here are a few tips that you can use to make your Web site more patient-centric: • Research – Consult industry research, but make sure not to substitute it for research with your own target audience. Your audience has unique needs and expectations that are important to identify and understand. • Strategy and Ownership – It is best to set a long-term Web strategy and secure executive buy-in to ensure your projects get the support they need. • Content Architecture – Content architecture helps your site visitors accomplish their tasks more efficiently by incorporating intuitive wording for navigational elements, building relationships between different content areas, and creating a natural site flow in a variety of usage scenarios. During development, keep in mind, you are generally not a good representative of your target audience, and you will need to test your architecture for usability. • Context Personalization – Context personalization helps you break down content silos by offering links to related information and a call to action on every page. This increases the value to visitors and improves conversion from site browsers to health system users. • Secure Patient-Provider Communications –The ability for patients to email their doctors is a highly-requested site function. Unfortunately, these communications often occur over unsecured, non-HIPAA compliant email. Be sure to offer a secure process. • Portal/Explicit Personalization – Patient portals should personalize all aspects of a visitor's online experience—think amazon.com for hospitals. For example: As a portal user, you can make an appointment with your physician, view a personalized calendar, pay your bill and view relevant classes. While many hospitals are focused on implementing impressive technology, they fail to realize the full value of their investment because they do not consider the needs of their patients first. The key is to build a site that creates relationships with site visitors to ensure they choose your health system when needed.
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