How to build the "perfect" website for your healthcare practice?

The year 2022 is drawing to a close and a brand new year is staring at our face. Are you adequately prepared to embrace 2023 and make it the most rewarding for your practice?

Over the course of last 1 year, Remassis (www.remassis.com) had the privilege of interacting with ~500 Physicians across the US. While majority of them were Physical Therapists, we also got the chance to interact with dentists, neurologists, psychiatrists and a few other specialisations. What really bothered us was the complete apathy towards building a solid online presence. Quite a few amongst these Physicians did not have a website of their own. Majority that had a website only had it for the sake of it.

Something that all Physicians need to understand is that a website is indispensable in today’s era. For many, it is their first experience of your practice. It is the first impression you make on many of your patients or patients-to-be (or not to be, depending on how that impression goes…).?Hence having a functional website is a sanity check that every practice needs to pass.

In the industry, we call the experience people have using your site “user experience” or “UX” for short. It boils down to things like the look and feel of the site, how easy it is to navigate, and how fast it responds.

When people have a good user experience, they trust you, they have positive feelings about your service, and they come back.

When people have a bad user experience, they generally do not trust you, have negative feelings about your service and they do not come back.

?What is a good UX after all?

A good user experience or UX is something which is not easy to crack. It’s not an easy one-shoe-fits-all. What might be user friendly for a young audience might be cumbersome for septuagenarians. Hence it is extremely critical to first understand your own business and your preferred target audience.

If you are running a geriatric PT practice as an example, it would be wise to have a very simple website which can be easily navigated with the minimum clicks possible. Focus should be on collecting basic patient information and then arranging a call back.

One simple rule of thumb that we follow while building customizations for our doctor partners at Remassis (www.remassis.com) is to fully understand what their brick and mortar practice looks like. The website needs to be an online avatar for whatever is working successfully in the offline practice. You follow the same colour themes and overall look and presentation.?

?Proof of Concept

The simplest way to judge the efficacy of your website is to have your existing patients test them our for you. Not only it saves the expenses incurred on hiring expensive testers, it gives you real time feedback from actual users rather than simulated users. This form of real time testing however would involve a lot of prodding and push from you as the owner of the practice and you could also come up with gamified incentives to ensure genuine feedback

Let’s say you have a website in place but it’s not getting any traction. You can easily measure traffic on your website through tools like Google analytics. If the traction is not good, it’s high time you looked at the following

1.????Poor optimization

Lot of websites are designed specifically for desktops or laptops. This is an extremely archaic form of website design in a world where more users are online via their mobile phones than laptop or desktop. What this leads to is an extremely frustrating experience for users who choose to surf your website on the mobile phone. This is the first thing that you as an owner need to work if your website is not designed for smooth usage on mobile phones.

Earlier this year Google rolled out the mobile-friendly algorithm that penalizes sites that aren't?optimized for mobile. If you aren't sure if your site is mobile-friendly you can check out?Google's mobile friendly test here?or?read the mobile friendly guidelines.

2.????Using too many stock photos

Stock photos can be a big website killer. For someone who is running a brick and mortar practice, how difficult can be it to get actual photographs from your running practice. While these might not be the best photos, but they are your biggest testimonial. It will also give a potential customer (patient) a better comfort level to see photos from real cases that you are handling than some filtered, jazzed up photos lifted off the internet.

Similarly, if you have staff members, it would always create huge impact to have photos of staff members at work rather than generics. Remember, a patient is generally in a nervous state. Being able to put a name to a familiar face is always more comforting that to suddenly realize that what the team looked like on the website is very different from the actual team at the Clinic

3. Have them, flaunt them!

Not all practices can afford team or staff. If you are someone who is running a mid-sized practice that employs staff under you, make sure you openly flaunt your team and their credentials. Each single member of your team should have a photograph and a profile on the website. This section needs to be particularly dynamic. You should be able to quickly pull down the profiles for team members that have left or new team members that are being added

4. Content is king.

The more content you actively keep pushing, the more it will drive your patients to keep coming back to the website to consume that content. Having a blog link on the website is an absolute must. Ensure that you or a team member is serially putting out blog posts which are relevant to your practice or for your patients. Similarly, creating videos/snackables and disseminating them through the website is equally important.

While you are whiteboarding your website, make sure you have dedicated content section and you are updating it on a regular basis. This will drive back first timers to your website again and again. Almost like magic!

5. Remove annoying elements

An average user spends less than 15 seconds on your website. If you have a rather loud or annoying music running in the background, this can reduce even to less than 5 seconds. Due to the rather limited time spent by an average user on a new website, the desperation to attract him is understandable. However, be very careful with what you decide to integrate or offer. Music that you find mesmerizing might be annoying to someone else. It is always safe to stay away from music or animations/videos on the main landing page

You are a doctor, not a magician!

While there are so many resources available today that can help you build a website or an application quickly, more often than not they end up building a rather shoddy product. As a doctor, a good website can help increase your business manifolds. It is important to come out of the thought process where you start treating yourself as a magician who can do everything.

While it will entail an expense, it is highly recommended to outsource your website development to an agency that can do it for you. In the last couple of years, we have worked on building the website for at least a dozen of healthcare practices at Remassis (www.remassis.com). 50% of them already had a website in place. Closer examination revealed that these amateur websites were actually doing more harm than good to the business. Redoing such websites ended up wasting a lot of precious time of the doctor as well as their teams.

If you are the owner of a healthcare practice and already have a website in place, we would be happy to do a free of cost forensic audit for your website and come back with our recommendations. This is a limited time offer. In case, you would like a complimentary forensic audit of your website, please fill up the form