If you are like some hospital executives, you may consider your hospital website to be a cost center. Considering the size and complexity of most healthcare systems, the creation and maintenance of a well-constructed website is indeed an investment in time, resources, and careful coordination between the constituencies that shape your business.
Built strategically, however, your hospital website should be a profit center.
A digital foundation that drives profits
A fundamental of strategic web design is development against stated goals – and that requires proper time, research, and planning. Not only should your hospital website support the hospital’s strategic initiatives, but it must be designed to connect visitors to the right information and opportunities for action. Herein you will discover the profit potential.
So what’s in a brand?
A brand facilitates healthy, empowered strategic functions in your organization, and its value isn’t just external. It also plays a major role in aligning resources internally. Strong brand positioning positively impacts performance and unites teams in delivering on your core values. This also creates a consistent patient and caregiver experience.
- Support for top service lines: You know which service lines drive revenues; the right strategy ensures that they achieve maximum visibility.
- Minimized self-diagnosis: In the post-referral era, good information keeps a patient with arm pain from visiting an orthopedic specialist instead of a cardiologist.
- Hospital reputation management: Your website is a prime location to drive a favorable market reputation.
- Efficiency: When patients are prepared before treatment, they are more likely to arrive educated and in the right place – keeping schedules intact.
- Healthy relationships: Patients that work closely with healthcare providers post-care often experience better outcomes, enhancing success statistics.
- Trial protocol recruitment: Leveraging your site to promote trials can connect you with a wide, well-qualified candidate pool.
Designed with measurable goals, your website can play a critical role in driving long-term profitability – but first you must ensure that the profit- drivers are “visible.”
Online Wayfinding
In architecture circles, wayfinding is known as the process by which individuals are oriented in physical space – digital signage guiding patients to the maternity ward, for instance, rather than the OR. Elements might include signage, lighting, or placement of information stations.
Wayfinding is also a useful metaphor for the strategy that drives profitable websites: UX, or User Experience Design.
The Art of User Experience Design
A website without a strategy is like a hospital wing designed with no thought to its use. UX positions your site for impact, based on defined goals and centered, above all else, on data. Whether it’s setting an appointment, finding a doctor, or signing up for seminars, a website grounded in this digital wayfinding technique is more likely to connect visitors with the actions you want them to take. This is achieved via clear directional signals, including proper navigation, page titles, page architecture, and more:
- Sitemaps that structure navigation against business objectives
- Content maps that align resources against objectives
- Wireframes that define how content and functionality interact
- Functionality requirements and process-flow documentation
- A/B usability testing that vets prototypes in a usability lab
Above all else, UX is a discipline of data-driven, results-oriented Information Architecture and persuasive design. It is the system by which large amounts of data are filtered, categorized, and translated, resulting in sites designed to stimulate results – and indeed, long-term profitability. When your site development includes serious User Experience Design, visitors are seamlessly guided through a site that may have many audiences, much like a hospital itself. Information that can be found means opportunities that are not lost.
A sustainable, profitable website – it is achievable. The trick is to define goals, invest strategically, and begin with a foundation in UX. Your hospital website will never be the same.
