How do health searches happen?
According to Pew’s report, Online Health Search 2006:
“the typical health information session starts at a search engine, includes multiple sites and is undertaken on behalf of someone other than the person doing the search.”
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| Search Matrix: How patients search online for health information |
Patients typically come to hospital websites in a state of deep anxiety and want the following questions answered:
2. Who’s going to fix it? And how?
3. Who’s going to pay for it?
4. Is there free parking? (Which is my funny way of saying, “Give me the logistical details I need to get cured.”)
How to make your disease-specific pages better for patients
If you are responsible for writing or creating hospital web content, you need to start paying careful attention to your disease-specific pages because those are the pages the majority of your patients are landing on.
How do you make these pages sticky? Here are 5 practical suggestions for making health conditions pages sharper and geared toward your user audience:
1. Anticipate and answer your users’ questions from the get go. This will probably require redesigning a template, but the ROI could potentially be HUGE. Consider creating a page that describes the disease, has a call to action to make an appointment and a set of quick links to common logistical questions patient have, like maps and directions. You would be surprised how many hospitals do not do this well. I will not name names.
2. Introduce your selling point early in the conversation. This is what Ginny Redish (Letting Go of the Words) urges Web writers to do: Find the moment in the conversation when the marketing information is critical to the buying decision. Do you start a conversation with someone by telling them why they should be friends with you? No, you look for moments of connection. But on the Web, your users have already started the conversation with YOU!!! They are looking to be convinced—people don’t search for health information for fun. Look at how the Mayo Clinic does it: Right way, up front, they tell you why you should choose them for treatment of urinary incontinence.
3. Optimize according to the disease or condition, not the hospital name. In your browser title, make sure you have the name of the condition, not the name of the hospital first. Include geographic information. This way patients who using the drill down method of searching noted in the search matrix above have a better shot of finding you. Title tags should look like this:
Urinary Incontinence Treatments and Symptoms | Rochester, Minnesota | Mayo Clinic
4. Tell them who their treating physicians will be and what difference they bring to the table. This means more than staff bios. It means a team page where you describe the overall diagnostic and treatment approach of the department or division. And if you use the word multidisciplinary, EXPLAIN what the hell that means.
5. Describe the diagnostics and procedures in a way that’s specific to your institution.
For example:
a. At Hospital X, we prefer to perform most of these procedures using a minimally invasive approach because our doctors find this leads to less blood loss, reduced risk of infection and a shorter hospital stay. However, if you are not a candidate for minimally invasive surgery, our doctors will discuss all possible surgery options with you.
b. At Hospital Y, our physical therapy offices are conveniently located across the hallway from our joint replacement patients’ rooms, so they don’t have to travel far for their daily rehabilitation appointments.
c. At Hospital Z, our commitment to quality means that every nurse is an oncology-certified nurse, so that he or she has had extra training in cancer treatments and managing a cancer patient’s needs.
Practically, how do I do this?
Let me guess? There’s two of you managing and writing 9,000 pages? So don’t implement all five steps at once. Instead, pick a department that needs some help increasing patient volumes and analyze what you can do on three to four pages to make them better. Watch what happens to your analytics and other measurements of ROI, like call center volume and appointments. When you see what can happen when you improve those disease-specific pages, you’ll be ready to change them all.
Let me know if you have other tips for making those pages better. I'm interested to hear what strategies have worked.
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