It doesn’t matter what your business is these days, your website is the face of your organization and your brand - and yes, this is even true for physicians and their medical practices.
A strong website and online presence shouldn’t be an option for healthcare providers. Patients and potential patients are constantly seeking health information and looking for new doctors online.
Additionally, having an effective website can help streamline patient check-ins and communication, make a patient portal easily accessible, and help educate patients about your practice processes, as well as important health issues. To support your practice’s success, your website should both attract and inform new and current patients.
You’ll immediately enhance the credibility of your practice and your doctors simply by having a modern and professional looking site. One of the main objectives you should have as you plan for your website is to ask yourself, how can we increase the credibility of our practice and physicians on the site? Because if you achieve this goal, you’ll also help to bring in more new patients.
When someone decides to visit your practice’s website, more than likely they will be looking for:
We’ll design your site so it is easy to find information, while leveraging technology to improve your customer/ patient service. While at the same time, reducing your staff workload and phone time. Consider having a clearly visible “Patient Center” or “Patient Resources” area where everything they need is conveniently located. And make sure you have basic “site search” capabilities on your website.
The more basic questions you can answer for your patients online, the more time your staff will have for more important work or patient care. Consider having an FAQ page in your resources area. Start with basics regarding your processes, insurance, and policies. If you have a unique specialty area, you may also want to answer basic questions about what you, as a doctor, do or don’t do. Remember to consider the general, uneducated public, when determining what these questions to answer. What better way to figure out what your patients are asking than to ask your staff about the most common questions they get both in person and via the phone.
We understand that this may seem obvious, but many physicians may not realize that non-physicians (i.e. most site visitors) do not understand the nuances or breadth of every specialty. For example, many people won’t know the specific differences between a general cardiologist, an interventional cardiologist, a cardiothoracic surgeon, and a vascular surgeon. Maybe you're a general surgeon, but you also have expertise in osteopathic medicine and osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT). If you feel that differentiates your practice, then use that to your advantage and communicate it on your site. Or what if you are a neurosurgeon, but you also focus on non-invasive treatments or regenerative medicine such as stem cell treatments. You should communicate your focus areas clearly on your homepage, probably leveraging visuals (images or icons) for ease of communicating quickly to visitors.