Patient demands on the work of medical practices have changed significantly in recent years. After medical care and organization, services are now the third most important indicator for assessing the quality of services provided by medical practices.
From the perspective of practice visitors, the term “service” defines all additional offers and activities that accompany the core medical services. In this context, the practice homepage plays a central role as a service tool. In order for your practice site to fulfill this role optimally, it is important to have adequate content, a user-friendly design, and useful offers.
Contents: The basic service information
In terms of content, an Internet presence designed as a service tool comprises the following basic building blocks:
Describe in detail what you offer
Such a compilation becomes a service if it does not just consist of a list, but describes the offers in detail. It is important here to identify typical indicative problem situations that patients face, as they are often looking for solutions to specific problems. This also increases the probability for you to be found and contacted on the net.
Show your diagnostic-therapeutic practice equipment
From the patient’s point of view, medical devices are also an important performance feature, so their existence should not go unmentioned. Also combine this overview with detailed information about the diagnostic and therapeutic possibilities offered by the devices and, most importantly, the concrete benefits they provide to practice visitors.
Present your team
The presentation of your range of services and your equipment options must be supplemented by the “human factor”, because patient-practice relationships live above all from personal contacts. It is particularly important for new patients to get to know a practice as well as possible on the web, and this includes, above all, an illustration of who they will meet in the practice. By describing the functions, training and competencies of the entire practice team, the patient gains a comprehensive insight.
Give an insight into your collaborations
Are you a member of a physician network or health care association, do you collaborate with other physicians, clinics or other providers? Then list these relationships on your home page and give your website visitors a sense of comprehensive care and security this way.
Show your patients the way
Not every potential practice visitor lives or works in the immediate vicinity of your practice. Therefore, it is a good service to describe exactly the location and, above all, the accessibility of your business on foot and by the possible means of transport, preferably supplemented by a location and route plan. Likewise, opening hours belong in the context of accessibility.
Use your website as a contact exchange
From a service standpoint, make it as easy as possible for your potential and actual patients to get in touch with you, offer all the technical options available to you, and above all, make sure that your practice is actually accessible (waiting times on the phone and on electronic requests).
Summary
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Design: What matters in a service-oriented implementation of content
The appearance of your homepage, i.e. the visual and textual implementation of the content, acts as a service tool if it offers net visitors an authentic insight into your practice and makes it easy for them to quickly find and easily understand the content they need.
Provide a structured visual variety
Service-oriented websites thrive on an optimized mix of shapes, colors, images and text that complement each other to form a structured and easily manageable whole that makes it easy for users to find their way around and leads to a positive UX (user experience). In addition to the basic layout and menu navigation, professionally taken photos (rooms, employees) play a particularly important role, as they ensure authenticity and attractiveness. It is also important to use responsive design technology, which ensures optimal display on all devices, from desktop to smartphone.
Every word counts
Text becomes a service when it is easy to read (font size) and understand. Above all, this means: Use language that is as patient-friendly as possible, largely avoiding technical terms. Rely on colloquial expressions when referring to diseases, diagnostics and therapy. This helps your readers to quickly find their way around the content, but it also helps you, because it is precisely this kind of wording that patients enter into search engines. Support the comprehensibility of your texts by using short, simply structured sentences and omit phrases, filler words and formulations that can be found on other practice homepages (“Our concern is high-quality patient care”). Structure longer text passages with paragraphs and subheadings.
Offers: What the patient can take away
These aspects for the functional design of your website as a service tool can be further complemented and supported by concrete offers that extend your website into an interactive platform:
Your website as a news room
Important service information for patients is not only – timely – information on changes in opening hours or closures for vacation reasons, but also vaccination recommendations or behavioral advice and comments on currently discussed health topics and events. They give website visitors orientation and security for everyday life. Old entries should be deleted immediately, because they look disturbing and above all unprofessional.
Patient education through medical insights
A large part of the population searches the Internet for reliable health information. You can support your patients in this by either offering a thematically organized collection of links for your most important indicative areas of care, pointing to websites that you have checked and that are compatible with your treatment concept, or by providing information yourself, for example in the form of explanations of your diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Explainer videos have a particularly authentic effect.
The homepage as an administrative assistant
An important service principle is to create convenience. Your online presence can contribute to this by providing the option to order prescriptions and referrals or to contact you electronically. Checklists for the preparation of examinations or medical history forms for new patients, which can be conveniently filled out at home, also fall into this category. An important new component in the area of administrative offerings is online appointment scheduling. This service makes your practice visitors independent of office hours and may also save waiting time on the phone.
Consultation outside office hours
This service category includes services such as online video consultation or webinars that can be accessed via the homepage.
Outlook: The practice app as a homepage extension
If the use of a responsive design ensures that your website “cuts a fine figure” on all end devices, an alternative form is now gaining in importance: the practice app. These are applications for mobile devices that enable practice teams to communicate not only the standard information provided by their practice websites, but also – depending on the scope of services selected – include more advanced communicative and interactive application options.
InFo PNEUMOLOGY & ALLERGOLOGY 2020; 2(2): 34-35.
