Hospital website design is key to a patient's first impression

For many healthcare facilities, its website is a patient’s first contact so designing an informative, user-friendly, navigatable site is crucial to establishing a good relationship. Two facilities discussed their website redesign efforts during a Dec. 11 webinar hosted by web development company Bridgeline Digital.

At the beginning of 2012, Children’s Hospital Colorado launched its Orthopedics Institute website, the first of its institute-specific websites. The hospital’s orthopedics program is ranked among the top 10 such programs in the U.S., so the website needed to match that ranking. The hospital “really focused on design,” said Robin Doerr, executive director of marketing and communications. “We elevated the visual design and interactivity to really create a better patient experience.”

The hospital started with significant pre-research, Doerr said. In talking with patients, family members and referring physicians, they “heard simple but profound things,” such as the need for ease in searching the site and a fun design that reflects the hospital’s in-person experience.

The new design is very easy to navigate, the main hospital phone number stands out on all pages and each page includes quick links. The design team conducted user interviews and used analytics to see where people went when they visited the site. As a result, the navigation bars “help us get visitors where they want to go very quickly,” Doerr said. A picture of a child allows users to click on various body parts to learn more about orthopedic conditions. On the left side, there is a breakdown of conditions by age groups.  

A subpage for sports medicine and sports injuries is another way to drive patient activation, Doerr said. Visitors can use the image of a person to click on body parts to search for specific injury locations or search by sport. “Often when people come to the site, they have no idea what their health issue might be.” This way they can click on the shoulder to learn more about shoulder pain or click on a certain sport to learn more about associated injuries. Many patients visit the website to learn more before they come into the hospital, Doerr said. Community partnerships, with a soccer league, for example, reinforce the hospital’s messaging. The site also features a blog that that members of orthopedic clinical staff update regularly, posting ways to avoid sports injuries. Information about the hospital’s involvement in concussion legislation also is featured on the website. The website serves as a vehicle “to build on the information you’re providing to the community more deeply” and establish and build relationships.

Focusing on a different patient population, Moffitt Cancer Center hadn’t updated its website in more than seven years when it launched a new website earlier this year, said Joseph Hice, VP of public relations and marketing. The Tampa, Fla. organization learned that website users considered the font too small and found that the search function so complex that visitors were leaving within seconds. Hice said they scheduled numerous focus groups and interviews among clinicians and, most importantly, patients. “We knew patients are the ones coming to the website with a diagnosis of cancer and we recognized that when that diagnosis comes down, the first place the patient goes to is a search engine.”

To drive that web traffic to Moffitt, Hice had to address several challenges in design. One of the biggest challenges, he said, was the site’s complexity. “The site was so complicated with link after link after link.” Another challenge was convincing people internally at Moffitt that less is more. “We heard that message loud and clear from the patients.” With the number of cancer types and cancer treatments, it also was challenging to focus the website, Hice said. Clinicians and other staff members wanted the website to include more, more, more so it was up to us to maintain the simple focus and figure out how to do more with less.”

The end result is working, he said. Traffic on the new patient-focused website has increased 12 percent, which is “phenomenal since we haven’t done anything to promote the site.” Visitors are spending a little less time one each page but visiting many more pages overall. “That confirms our belief that navigation is critical,” Hice said. The facility’s Google ranking also has increased dramatically, he reported.  

The website’s patient focus begins on the home page with 8 to 10 short video testimonials. The site also provides easy links to social media because “we recognize that patients and their families are getting lots of information from social media.”

In this highly competitive industry, “it behooves us to spend a lot of time on [website design],” said Doerr, “where we’re often making first contact with patients, to ensure that the experience we provide them is simple, clear and really reflects the brand experience of our organization.”