As Neal says, knowing your audience and purpose is critical. I think oftentimes people forget to take a step back and really ask what the purpose is.

The additional imperative for current patients is to offer practical resources.

As Neal points out, there are many reasons visitors come to a health care site. The challenge is not to lose sight of the basics by trying to be all things to all people.

You can take a look around, but one bit that I found a while back was the model they created for perfecting a hospital’s online presence: 1. Information, 2. Interaction, 3. Integration, and 4. Personalization.

At each step you develop online content and tools for your customers. Your hope is that you meet and exceed their expectation and in turn, modify their health care purchasing behavior.

I don’t have all the ideas of what to do, but I have a pretty good idea of what’s not worth doing. I follow two simple rules: 1. For content, “it must tell them something useful they didn’t already know.” 2. For online tools, it must “let them do something useful they couldn’t already do.”

If it doesn’t meet that criteria, scrap it.

I don’t think “do it because everybody else does it” has ever been a good rule. But that seems how most hospital web sites operate and maybe it works just fine for them.

But recently, there’s been more emphasis to make the web site work as a business development resource. So, I’m in your same boat … I need to produce more than just an online brochure.

Personally, I can say our hospital is looking at creating some unique online content and tools that are targeted at the “undiagnosed” – people who don’t need to come to the hospital yet, but very likely will in the next year. The programs are measurable and I hope to be able to produce significant downstream revenue results. And these are programs that take a little thinking and effort – nothing I can buy off the shelf.

I’ll let you know how it goes in about six months.