In 2011 70% of initial patient-physician interaction will be online through a medical website.
Patients are no longer interested in advertisements. Patients require the medical website to be your online office, and fully-functional. Its purpose is to convert visitors into patients. Most of the time, visitors already want to schedule an appointment with you … make it easy for them. All they really want to do is to verify information from the referral source. But they also want it to be a source of medical information.
The Medical Website Design.
Patients expect a clean design that is easy to navigate, with a home page, "about" page with biographies of the doctors and staff, services tab with clear definitions of conditions and treatments available (and for the best practices ever … a health library), a patient portal to download and secure transmit patient forms & history, separate portal for healthcare professionals (or at least a different version of whole site specifically designed for healthcare providers), a "contact" page, and most importantly a Patient Testimonials page. The simpler the medical website design, and the less stock photos, the more effective the online office will be.
1. Patients expect to see your office's phone number on every single page of your medical website. Make it easy for them to find it on the top and bottom of each page. This phone number is what makes your office office's goals a reality. You want patients to be able to call. What kind of number should you use? A 1-800 Number. Why? Because you can enable a tracking system to be built in. Your 1-800 number will tell you IF your medical website design works. Every time a new visitor calls it will automatically record it as a conversion and all the data will be available to you at a click of a button.
2. Medical Website Design must ensure that Email forms are easily accessible from each page. Many patients would like to schedule an appointment by email … especially from work when they can not call. However, make sure that if you offer an email as an option that someone from the office answers within less than 2-3 hours. The email is JUST as important as the phone number. If you can make email an option on the patient portal many patients would be very impressed with the level of interaction you offer.
3. Patient Portals / EMR will be a requirement for any medical website design as soon as 2011-12 comes around. If already 55% of patients interact online, and 70% is expected, investing in a patient portal changes the entire game. Interaction through a patient portal allows patients to download forms and privacy information, sign release forms, schedule appointments, submit all paperwork safely, and receive email answers, results of lab work, etc.
4. Medical website design can not exist without biographies. Patients want to know who their doctor is. This is NOT the place for your CV. This is your introduction to why patients should choose you. It should speak about what makes you the best doctor in the world … and trust me when I say that your degree from Ivy-League is the last thing that should be talked about. Your credentials can be placed on the side of the page. Most importantly it's the language in which the biography is written that speaks to your patients about who you are. Make sure the medical jargon is kept to a bare minimum
5. The Services Tab of your medical website should speak about your top specialties. If you're in a multi-doctor group it would be best to separate by specialties and include links to biographies from each service. Remember that patients are looking for experts, not generalists
6. Patient testimonials on a medical website speak about patient satisfaction , the very thing patients expect, but are never quite able to receive from their health care providers. It's important to note that you must adhere to the message of the patient testimonials and offer patient interactions during their visit that will closely match the satisfaction spoken about in the testimonials.
The design of the medical website must also be SEO friendly and ideally built on a content management system that will ensure that SEO can become a reality of every single page.
Look to our next installation: Medical Internet Marketing 1.2: Medical Websites – Medical Website SEO
