Why a new healthcare website is not just… a website.
While working with numerous healthcare providers and their teams on Patient Experience, it has come to my attention that hospitals and clinical staff are unaware of the impact of their online presence to their patients.
The penny drops when we ask them to map out the journey they would take to identify, locate and make their way to a new clinic. Healthcare is more complicated than it used to be. It’s not just about being sick or needing care. Increasingly there are elective procedures and a mixture of private and public options with a maze of insurance constraints.
Traditionally, hospitals and clinics were likely to be selected by patients based on their locality (closest to their home) or based on the referral from someone they trust.
Increasingly, in the digitally-driven world we are living in, patients’ first port of call is likely to be Google. Location might still be important. Searches ending in ‘Near Me‘ are growing rapidly as phones with GPS become standard.
However, the journey will be very different depending on the type of ‘persona’, the type of patient and the micro-moment.
The Importance of SEO and Content
A health-conscious patient’s journey is likely to start with searching for the symptoms such as, ‘persistent headache’. Google would present to them the results based on a combination of location information (if that is selected) and the presence of content on a website with resources/blogs containing these key words.
This is a competitive space. A ‘Head-tail’ search like headache will be competed for by drug companies as well as clinics. However, if the clinic has done a good content-development job, the customer-centred information would then link through to their ‘Book an appointment with us’ page.
What would the carer of the patient search for? Their journey is likely to start with a more specific search – ‘best doctor for dealing chronic headache’. Again, Google would present them with their results based on location as well as websites which contain these keywords in multiple guises on their site. The information that the carer would be (ideally) presented with is the doctor, their specialty and patient testimonials. From there, ideally, once again, the carer would have the option of booking from the website into the back-end of the system in the booking engine.
In addition, they are then likely to start another google search using the name of the actual doctor to double-check his or her credentials, any other negative or positive reviews or, even, if they have ever been struck off!
The above are just 2 examples of 2 personas looking for what would be similar information – a clinic and doctor which can cure chronic headaches. Their journeys, however, are completely different. This implies that the hospital or healthcare site has to be optimized to cater for these differing journeys from a content, imagery, clarity and location-based information.
And these examples just take into consideration the discovery phase of the journey for these 2 differing personas.
It is implied in the above that the booking experience is simple, visually consistent, user-friendly and does not ‘hang’ when someone is trying to book their slot. Ideally, the customer-facing website would have access to real-time appointment availability from the Hospital Management System (HMS). And, of course, that there is direct access to web-chat or contact numbers in case of any problems or technical glitches.
If you are a CMO or Director of the business, you want to make sure that all your systems are well integrated. The above examples involve multiple systems which ‘touch’ the patient – Google, the website’s content management system, the booking engine, the live-chat functionality. In some cases there may also be the requirement for payment, insurance claims and documents to be shared.
All of these have to be designed to work in a seamless path; the biggest challenge, of course, is that they are all ran by differing departments and there is highly sensitive information involved. Google, is of course an external enterprise and the Digital Marketing is likely to fall in the hands of an external agency; then IT and Customer Services are the departments which are likely to ‘oversee’ the remaining systems.
This is one of the reasons why when engaging on a hospital website build it is important to take the patient/persona experience first. Only when those journeys are mapped out and seamlessly integrated can the patient experience (and first impression) be a positive one. Hopefully, then, can that be the beginning of a long-lasting and beneficial relationship between the differing parties.
Speak to our team now if you would like to avoid the pitfalls of broken patient journeys.