Question: What’s the Role and Value of Healthcare Content on Hospital Sites?
Written August 29th, 2007 by Aaron HolbrookThis question was sent in by Mike Lynn, from Storandt Pann Margolis:
I have read a lot of research about “cyberchondriacs”, the huge percentage of people searching online for health information and I am trying to figure out how hospitals fit into this process. All the data indicates that the majority of searches are for information about a particular issue and usually start at Yahoo, Google or MSN.
So, does this mean that the people who go straight to a hospital site are not included? (Were they searching for “health” information or for hospital information?) And when they get to the hospital site, where do they go, and why? (Are they just using the site for general information about directions, hours, doctors, etc?).
Because of the empowerment of the internet, I’m wondering how the hospital sites fit into the equation. What role do hospital websites play… can they play?
I did do a bit of looking around on Webiscope but didn’t find anything specific so I thought I’d ask you directly what you thought.
How are you addressing this?
This is a great question - anyone care to take a stab at it?
August 29th, 2007 at 8:28 am
We’ve identified several very distinct types of visitors coming to our site, and by far the largest are those looking for health information. So hospital sites play a very big role. As a not-for-profit, we consider having that kind of information on our site a community service. It also is what most people are looking for. The folks looking for doctors, addresses, directions, etc. are sometimes very different from those looking for health content. But not always. We find many people research a health issue, and then want to take some action. Finding a doctor or facility that can help them is a natural next step for many of them.
August 30th, 2007 at 8:09 am
I think this is a great question. What roles do hospital sites really play in the overwhelming statistic that we see of people going online to look up a health condition? And I bristle at the term “cyberchondriac”. While that may have fit in 1997, who among us has NOT looked up something that was nagging them? I’m still trying to shake a cough that I’ve had for three weeks and have found that I have either whooping cough or COPD (kidding).
Our stats tell a very different tale from Neal’s (for good reason, see below). First, there’s the self-reported reason for visiting. Repeated surveys with a high N show that people say they are coming to a) look for a job - 50%, b) look up a doc - 15% and c) directions/phone - 10%. Down the list is looking up a health condition at 5%.
Our site stats, though, don’t quite line up. Physician search is highest (10%), then jobs at between (5%-10%). Our specialty areas is around 5%.
Now, our site is different and it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg equation. We don’t have a lot of rich condition/disease information on it. We do not subscribe to 3rd party content. So, people don’t come because it’s not there.
To me, that goes back to the heart of the question. What role does/should a hospital site play in disease/condition lookups? What purpose does it serve if 1,000 hospitals all have the same information from 3 to 5 3rd party vendors? Yes, certainly, a marketing purpose. But, what else?
I think it goes back to one of my mantras that I’ve repeated on these pages in the past. The holy grail would be to have a user scenario of - look up health condition - learn what makes this hospital/doctors good at/different to treat it - make an appointment. Too often - and we are guilty - it’s the exact reverse.
- Chris
August 30th, 2007 at 9:00 am
Good fodder…
We’re rewriting our site’s content. Our hypothesis is people want to know: 1.) what you do for them, 2.) proof you do it better than the next hospital, 3.) what it costs (in time, pain, and money), and 4.) what to do next.
We’re assuming the only way we can modify future purchasing behavior is to give them great content and useful tools in order to exceed their visitor expectations. If satisfied, they come to our hospital or refer others.
The extent of the content depends upon the level of consumer choice. We don’t need 18 pages of content for our emergency and trauma services because there really isn’t much consumer choice in the matter. On the other hand, people have more choice with say, oncology. So we provide more content.
About content style: I read a lot of superlative copy out there. Lots of adjectives. Lots of cute and clever words. It’s almost impossible to discern one hospital’s services from another. As we rewrite our content, we painstakingly omit the platitudes and clichés and give people useful information to help them make a sound healthcare decision.
About the ‘call to action’: Most hospital website content I read consists of ‘hard offers’ only (i.e., find a doctor, schedule an appointment). But they offer nothing in between (except maybe classes or events here and there). So, we’re looking into ’soft offers’ that allow the prospective patient to take an immediate action without making a full commitment. Some ideas are to offer a health membership program or extensive online health risk assessment tools. The objective is to get them into our system before their condition requires urgent or emergent services.
About Format: I once heard the sage wisdom that even if people are convinced you’re the best (whatever), there are three main reason as to why they still might not buy from you: 1.) they don’t like you, 2.) they don’t trust you, and 3.) you don’t make it easy. There are plenty of websites that are guilty of one or a combination of these (our current website included).
We’ll test this hypothesis with a combination of online surveys and traffics statistics.
What we want to learn is how much new business did we generate with our website… business we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Granted, it’s difficult to give the website full credit for any leads or conversions. So, we need to be conservative with our results: subtract business generated due to loyalty factor, insurance restrictions, strict physician referrals, etc.
Once we can run those numbers (might take a year or two), I’ll be able to better give you an objective answer to your question, Mike.
August 30th, 2007 at 9:47 am
We consider the health information an essential community service. And our patients often thank us for offering the content. They believe they can trust it since it’s from their health care provider.
August 30th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Not too long ago, we did a usability study of our site and learned a lot of helpful information that we’re gradually using to make changes on our site. One of the things we learned is that parents (we’re a children’s hospital) were very pleased to find health care content on the site. (Except for a few areas, most of the content is “home grown” –written by staff.) Sadly, I have to admit that there are some divisions that are not cooperative, and in those areas we have little or no clinical content.
But more good news here: in addition to pleasing parents, I’ve also learned that having a lot of “long tail” content really helps maximize search engine optimization. In case that term is not one you’re familiar with, long tail content is basically information about the more rare, unusual conditions. I like this analogy that I read somewhere…. “The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. So the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are. What’s really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you’ve got a market bigger than the hits.”
We’ve really seen how this works in Fetal health — (http://www.childrensmemorial.org/depts/fetalHealth/overview.asp) I have not checked these terms lately but several months ago, here’s how Google ranked our site for the following terms:
Fetal ureterocele – Comes up as #1 in Google; Fetal duplication of collecting systems – Comes up as #1; Fetal craniosynostosis — #1; Neonatal hemochromatosis – #6; Fetal ventriculomegaly — #4; ventriculomegaly — #4; Fetal hydronephrosis — #3; Fetal diaphragmatic hernia — #4
And the fetal health staff told me that we got 4 Web-based referrals in one week. Natcherly, that made my day!
August 30th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Hello. I’m a first-time contributor, though I’ve been reading WebiScope for about a month. As someone new to the industry, thanks Aaron, Delia, and members for this great resource.
The bottom line for me is this: as member of a non-profit health care provider’s web team, my primary goal with our consumer-facing site is strategically communicating our health services: what we have, and how to find them. Presumably, folks who spend time looking for online health resources also want to do something about what they discover.
The integration of third party health information, then, is another part of our toolkit, intended to build site visitors’ confidence in the organization as a trusted, go-to health care partner, and to drive current and prospective patients toward actionable content. (This is not to diminish the fact that health info. is also a community service, and increases user value.) Our article on prostate health, for example, is less a research destination in itself, and more an invitation to schedule a screening, or place that particular concern on men’s wellness radar. Of added strategic benefit is, of course, that you maximize site visitors’ time on your site, making them less likely to wander off, and more likely to return.
To my mind, all the various elements of your site have the accretive effect of composing your organization’s identity in a site visitor’s head; hopefully he or she will want to initiate a relationship of some sort – and there’s a continuum here. Whether requesting an appointment or subscribing to an e-newsletter, any interaction is a good one.
I should add the caveat that our site currently does not host a health information library, though our re-design will.
In short, services are the thing.
August 31st, 2007 at 9:15 am
I don’t doubt that this comprehensive third-party content creates reputability, but let me play devil’s advocate.
Too many Web sites I’ve seen (including our own) overuses or misuses third party content. This, in my opinion, comes down to three things: integration/structure, knowledge, and content.
The integration/structure problem I’ve seen is widespread, and generally you can see who uses healthcare-oriented vendors for their Web site structure. Most sites with third-party content merely link to the content in two ways: the content as a whole and in each service line. If you click on this content, it takes you away from the service line and potentially confuses your visitor. Unless you add links within the content or in the sidebars (if you’re so lucky), you may lose a potential referral. Integration into your service line is key, and dynamic links in the panes have really come a long ways in helping this.
However, I do think third-party content is given way too much credit. Yes, it looks nice; yes, it increases reputability. But let’s say you’re a mother of a sick child. QUICK: where are you going to look online? Probably either search for the symptom on Google or Yahoo! or you might go to WebMD. Do that many people come to an individual hospital’s Web site for health content? Our numbers largely say no (as most visitors to the content come from the service lines we link from). And this is despite being named one of the best places on the internet to go for pediatric health content. The numbers just aren’t there.
Then there’s content. It’s all the same. Unless you do it manually or subscribe to some SEO service, your content is the same as everyone else’s. Which isn’t bad, necessarily, since I doubt someone will go to multiple hospitals’ Web sites for the same information (I could be wrong, though). But we’ve had instances where service lines completely disagreed with the content and changed it. What happens if we change it to something correct while someone else doesn’t? Might decrease reputability and increase confusion. (Perhaps I’m over-analyzing.)
I’m in favor of creating your own content. Content that is different, approved, and you can integrate perhaps more easily into your service line. And you won’t have problems with SEO, either. Problems with this type of content, however, is A. creation (time, personnel, willingness), B. maintenance (again, time, personnel), and C. the sheer number of content. But if your organization is open to workflow (and we know how hard that can be with clinicians), you can make it work.
Bottom line is that I see third party content’s usefulness as overrated (despite Kerry’s wonderful success), but still necessary. But not on grounds that it’s a community service (even though that does sound nice), but rather that it supports the content on service lines that is oh-so-lacking on many organizations’ Web sites. (And, granted, that includes our own, and we’re looking into flexible systems that would allow us to better integrate/structure the content.)
August 31st, 2007 at 9:29 am
Oh, Kerry, the Long Tail. I love it! I’d like to use your hospital and Georgetown University Hospital (apologies to anyone on the list who is from there; this is not a criticism, just an observation - and as I’ve said before our site has very little disease/condition information). Children’s Memorial in Chicago has a lot of long tail (and as Kerry said “home grown” content) that is put into context of its services. If you type in “Kawasaki Disease” from the home page, you get lots of pertinent results, including a CENTER for KD. This section includes causes, symptoms, treatment options, research. It is very clear that this hospital is very capable for this.
If I type in “Kawasaki Disease Chicago” in Google, I give you one guess as to what is No. 1. Yep, Children’s Memorial.
Now, I go to Georgetown University, which subscribes to ADAM. I love ADAM content. But if I type in “Kawasaki Disease” on the GU homepage, I get zero results. If I navigate, I do find that they infectious disease as a “medical service.” If I go to Health Information from the main navigation and search for Kawasaki Disease, I get the very informative ADAM information.
If I type in “Kawasaki Disease Washington DC” in Google, I do not find GU site. But I do find article upon article that indicates that there is research going on there at GU.
My point? Going back to the original question of what role hospital Web sites have in providing health information … which hospital Web experience provides the type of marketing effect we would want to have on a visitor? The ADAM information is great, it serves, it informs. But it doesn’t tie back to the hospital.
- Chris
August 31st, 2007 at 10:09 am
Thanks Thomas and Chris, et al, for some things to think about as we move forward in our re-design, and choose a third party health info. vendor. We do realize that integration needs to be more elegant than some examples currently out there. And, as we all know, sometimes it’s hard to convince the decision-makers and money-spenders what exactly may be overrated, useful, or a feasible combination of the two.
As a content person, I’m keen on what Thomas and Chris say regarding homogeneous third party content vs. in-house content, with respect to s.e.o. Perhaps a combination of the two?: complementing the third party stuff with original content that feeds directly to your organization’s key specialty services.
–Dan Haley (in case I come up as Anonymous again)
September 12th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
This is a terrific discussion. Thanks to Delia and Aaron for providing such a place for this kind of high-level conversation.
I take the approach that it all depends…(Nice cop out, I know.) But I think it does. It depends on the strategy at your hospital or health system, it depends on your budget (purchasing third party content is really expensive for some places), it depends on what role your hospital plays in your community or region.
It may not make sense for a small community hospital in a sea of big players. It may be their resources go to creating a site that provides hyper-local content about their docs and services.
But if you’re at a hospital where you believe you have a public/fidicuiary role to play in educating the populace about health, it makes sense. If you’re trying extend your reach beyond your traditional geo-market, it may make sense because it helps your seo.
My dilemma is the homegrown and purchased content…Integrating the purchased and homegrown content is such a huge task. We’re in the middle of doing it and I’ll tell you that it’s a difficult and tedious task.