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A healthcare website allows people to communicate their concerns, know about varied conditions, and manage care for their loved ones. However, a lot goes into the website design and development process, making the end result overcomplicated. As a result, people find these websites difficult to use. If you plan to revamp your existing healthcare site, follow some effective practices for higher patient engagement.
These are essential, whether creating a new website or redesigning an existing one. Today, most patients indulge in online searches while looking for a healthcare provider. Therefore, you must improve your online presence if you are a healthcare service provider. A poor web presence can lead to disastrous results, including losing credibility and existing customers.
Following the best healthcare website design practices can be a great way to avoid this. I have covered some highly effective ones in this blog. Read on to learn more.
Quality Content
When a user visits a healthcare website, he will do one of two things - obtain information or make a transaction. For this, your website must have extensive content management capabilities. It includes vast text and video materials covering health-related topics.
You must ensure that your website has quality content and resources. These can help you position your website as an industry leader in patient-centric clinical care and medical services. You must focus on developing reassuring and knowledgeable messaging that visitors of all kinds will find informative, valuable, and useful for their purposes.
Additionally, you need to avoid too much marketing fluff. There should be a fine balance while talking about your physicians and organization. The focus must be on informing users how your services will support them in solving their medical problems.
Simplicity is the Key
Healthcare website visitors are mostly stressed. They could be in a hurry as their current or potential health issues can cause them anxiety. A busy healthcare website that is distracting and difficult to navigate will make things worse. Not only will they not help resolve those concerns, but they will also add to their frustrations. You wouldn’t want this obviously!
The last thing your online visitors will want to see is large text sections and complex language. You must focus on clear and concise content as it serves users better. While designing your digital healthcare platform, your goal should be to make visitors think as little as possible while scrolling through your platform. You must ensure the site content and design are simple and not overly text-heavy. Progressive disclosure will be useful in this regard. What is it? Let me explain.
Following the “Progressive disclosure” approach, web designers defer advanced features to a secondary screen. This allows them to make the website and apps easier to learn and less error-prone. It means you must initially show users some of the most relevant options. Later, you can offer them a more extensive set of specialized options upon request. This method reduces the complexity of a site considerably. Two effective ways to do so are:
Hiding text-heavy content in website sections that visitors can choose to expand if they think it’s necessary.
Including “quick links” on the homepage to provide users with quick, one-step access to the most useful pages of your healthcare web platform.
Go For Accessible Website Design
The 2021 Disability Statistics Annual Report states that 13.4% of the U.S. population suffers from a disability. As a result, they find it challenging, even impossible at times, to interact with healthcare websites for scheduling appointments, filling out forms, and other related tasks.
Considering it from your business’s point of view, this can be a major issue. If someone cannot access your online platform due to a disability that negatively affects their vision, hearing, or physical capabilities, they cannot use your advanced digital healthcare services. You must check out multiple successful healthcare website examples while designing your platform.
Even though every website needs to follow inclusive practices, the stakes are a lot higher for healthcare websites. Medical institutions have two major reasons for them to own responsibility for their digital platform’s inclusivity:
Privacy and Security
A patient will ask for help if he cannot access medical records or pay healthcare bills. They will require assistance in entering sensitive and personal information. This can be a big privacy issue. Additionally, these practices also take away their autonomy and independence.
Implementation of a Compliance Strategy
It can be a matter of life or death to obtain location information, access emergency phone numbers, research symptoms, and schedule medical appointments. High stakes are involved in numerous aspects of the healthcare profession, and website accessibility is no different.
Additionally, there are multiple legal ramifications around ADA liability. Thus, it’s only wise for healthcare service providers to implement a compliance strategy and address accessibility issues. This is compulsory for medical organizations and healthcare entities that get government funding.
Easy-to-Find Contact Information
As mentioned above, many people with disabilities will visit an online healthcare platform to search for information about their medical problems. One of the initial points of interaction with your website for a patient or their family members will be to find location information. Therefore, you must ensure they do not find it a barrier or get frustrated because of the complex steps involved!
Some of the common types of information gathering include:
Researching health conditions and their symptoms
Learning about a healthcare facility’s capabilities and specialties
Research about doctors and healthcare specialists
Finding location information
You must preemptively attempt to answer the patients’ queries by including a few vital pages. It includes FAQs, location, and a directory. These are some proven healthcare website designing ideas. Additionally, it will help your healthcare institution since your staff won’t get busy manually answering questions related to location, hours, and other common ones.
A Good Understanding of HIPAA and HITECH
Let me begin with The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). It was introduced to protect patients’ privacy and ensures the confidentiality and availability of protected health information (PHI). Let me come to the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. Introduced in 2009, it empowered the governing body to enforce HIPAA compliance in healthcare organizations and their business associates.
Let’s return to your potential healthcare website and its designing. It may need to comply with HIPAA if you use the site to obtain, showcase, store, process, or transfer PHI. It also applies to storing patient information on a server connected to your online platform.
An example will help clear your doubts. If you use the website for just marketing and informational purposes, providing contact information, and listing your varied services, then you need not comply with the HIPAA requirements.
A few examples of digital platforms that involve PHI and HIPAA compliance -
Websites having contact forms that obtain and submit health-related information
Patient portals
Live chat
Virtual appointment scheduling
Email submission through your website
Have a Blog and Include Patient Resource Page
Using engaging content and sticking to a consistent publishing schedule while designing a healthcare website in New York will help keep it relevant in search engine results. It will help position you as a market leader in patient-centered clinical care and medical services, thus, highlighting your expertise. You can then stay connected with patients and your medical community.
To start things, you can build a valuable library of SEO-friendly blog posts. However, if it seems overwhelming, you can hire a web design and development team to build the blog section.
Your range of content could include the following:
Industry news
Profiles of your physicians
Local community events
In-depth information on your product or services
Announcements
Let me now explain the utility of a patient resource page. This section of the website is extremely helpful for your patients. It is also an excellent way to include outbound links on your online platform to other authoritative sources. This helps enhance your search engine rankings considerably. This part of your online platform could include content like:
Traditional news stories
Relevant medical studies
Emerging health trends
You can go for a secure, responsive, HIPAA-compliant web hosting company
Securely encrypt all contact forms, chatbots, or appointment services through your website
Get a signed business associate agreement for business partners
Secure your virtual space with an SSL certificate to ensure encryption in the connection between the browser and your digital platform
Formulate and implement policies and procedures for collecting, storing, transferring, and deleting PHI
You should back up all PHI regularly
Provide HIPAA compliance training to anyone with authority to use your website
Use a notice of privacy practices and your HIPAA policy. You must do it even if it’s just down in the website footer section
Conclusion
You can implement these effective and proven web design practices in your digital healthcare platform. If you find these difficult to execute, take the help of a website design company with experience in the healthcare domain.
Their specialized and expert team will ensure your website has an attractive design with every standard practice followed, ensuring a greater user experience and better search engine result page rankings.
