The advantage we have over WebMD and the like, though, is that we’re much more interactive. At our best, we can provide the opportunity for an online health- and wellness-oriented relationship with site visitors. With the thoughtful integration of actionable content, we can drive consumers to our services, and to expand that relationship offline, all in a region-specific manner that’s great for our communitites.

With a sharp eye on health care web user research, it’s incumbent on us to be strategic in what we place on our sites, to always keep patient benefit in mind, and to provide next steps alongside our content and features.

Another age I think we’re living in is the second opinion. More organizations are offering second opinion services which is a bit of a conundrum for we marketers, in my opinion. You advertise second opinion while you’re also advertising that they should come for our opinion and our opinion only, haha!

But I think both of these cases, in terms of bigger diagnoses that require many visits or a surgery, are evidence of why it’s so important to offer a more-than-adequate description of your service line, services, and statistics. (You’re right that two places saying they’re “innovative” in their treatments numbs the user, but I would also contend that if one place said they had a 95% 1-year success rate vs. the other organization’s 87% success rate, you can be sure that the patient will trust the former organization and perhaps override his or her doctor’s recommendation.)

Just some thoughts!

Is it to provide health content? With WebMD and other health content-related websites, is it necessary for us to provide a comprehensive database of knowledge? Should we make that a priority or a supporting role for our service lines?

Is it to provide a marketing avenue for our services? Should a hospital’s website focus on its services and doctors, attempting to cash in as much as possible, ROI-wise?

I think my biases are evident in this case: I choose the latter but while using comprehensive health content in a supporting role. I think with so many other comprehensive health resources out there, the focus of an organization’s website should be the organization itself. And, in doing so, it should provide some content to the visitors, but I don’t know if it’s as important as some organizations make it out to be or if they use it as I would deem as appropriate.

Sure, not every person coming to the site is going to want and/or understand quality scores but numbers suggest that some people (~15% according to Forrester) do. And some people want to read clinical content about whatever condition their doctor has just diagnosed them with. And some of those people are going to drop off the site afterwards while others will want to find a specialist or a support group or simply directions to their next appointment…

The greater the variety and the more idiot-proof the structure, the greater the reach of one of your organization’s most valuable communication tools.

In fact, in our market, every major site lists some kind of quality and outcome data, and everybody has absolutely wonderful things to say about themselves. How is anybody supposed to make a choice based upon that?

What health care needs is an independent and generally accepted group to evaluate and report on health care quality. We have a half dozen, and none are generally accepted. Then we’ll need patients to stop defining health care quality as price and how nicely they were treated by their nurse. I think we’re still a long ways off.

My second response is directly to Thomas’ question about how we’re using 3rd party content. I could spend a long time on this topic, but we have managed to link together the major content sections of our site, so there are easy links to and from each “bucket” no matter where you start or wind up. Since so much of our traffic was going to the health content already, we weren’t completely surprised when our conversion rate went up by almost one-third when we offered those linkages.

Neal

We’re currently in the midst of redeveloping our site and the plan is to throw up a service line skeleton (supported heavily by third-party health content) and then work through an iterative update process – bolstering key service lines and hopefully, over time, working our way through the very long list.

Even an organization like Mayo that has the resources available to create great custom content manages to drop the ball when it comes to creating a dialog with the consumer.

The user scenario you mentioned above is typical of a new patient experience but to really engage that parent, you need great content, a well-designed site, useful tools and strong paths to ROI-tied calls-to-action. And then you have to accommodate the next user that has the same needs but is looking through your site in a completely different way.

What fun and challenging jobs we all have