The ongoing advancement of technology has not left healthcare untouched. The technological revolution has changed the way most people interact with healthcare, and the pandemic has only increased our reliance on digital channels due to social distancing rules and lockdowns. To keep up with patient demands and expectations, providers must now offer a seamless, personalized and convenient digital experience to patients in order to maintain high levels of satisfaction and retention.
Keep reading to learn how your practice can optimize the digital patient experience
- Easy to Navigate Website
Your practice website will be the core of your entire online presence, and as such it is crucial to creating a high-quality patient experience. Your website should be designed with ease of navigation in mind, ensuring that all patients are able to easily find exactly what they are looking for. The most important aspects of an easy to navigate website include:
- Legibility and easy to read text
- Navigation bar/menu at top of screen
- Different colors for sidebars to make them stand out
And much more, we’ve only covered the essentials here. Missing these or other important features could make your website difficult to navigate for patients, leading to them becoming frustrated and turning to other sources for the information they want.
While it is important, visual appeal should not take precedence over ease of navigation. With that said, it is still important to have a visually appealing and modern looking website.
- Mobile Friendliness
Most patients will be accessing your website on their smartphones. So not only do you need a website that is appealing and easy to navigate on desktop, you need to focus equally on ensuring the website offers a mobile friendly experience. Here are a few essentials to get you started with designing a mobile friendly website:
- Fast loading
- Simple design
- Easy access to FAQs
- Large font size
Being mobile friendly is crucial to offering a truly seamless and convenient experience. It ensures patients can easily find and contact the practice, and gives you a far greater reach than a desktop only website.
- Engaging Content
Content marketing is a core tenet of any successful digital marketing strategy. Healthcare content also has to be written in a very specific way. Patients looking for healthcare information will often become overwhelmed at the complex terminology and inscrutable medical jargon that is often widely present in such content.
To get the most out of your website content, it must be accurate, well-written and, most importantly, easily understandable. It should be written with simplicity in mind to ensure that even visitors with very little medical knowledge can understand what they were looking for. Search engine optimization techniques and best practices are also important if you are looking to reach the widest audience possible.
Accuracy is also an important aspect of the content. Well-written educational content that showcases your providers’ expertise in their specialties establishes trust in the audience and lends an air of legitimacy to the practice.
- Personalized Content
Personalized content for your practice website uses patient information to create and distinct experiences for each and every patient. Information collected allows the algorithms powering your website to know who exactly is viewing the content or receiving an email. Moreover, patients want to be treated as unique individuals rather than just another number on a spreadsheet. Providing them targeted, personalized content that deals with their health issues and conditions will show them that your practice actually cares, whilst also helping them gain a better understanding of what they are dealing with.
Marketing automation is an innovative new technology you can use to achieve this and increase patient engagement. Depending on the pages a patient visits, what part of their patient journey they are on and the information they fill out on your website, marketing automation can anticipate their needs and guide them in the right direction. This could mean sending them educational material pertaining to their condition or reminding them of follow-ups and asking for feedback and so much more.
- Live Chat
One of the important aspects of a good patient digital experience is the option for live chat on your website. Live chat acts as a support experience for patients, allowing them to get instant answers to any questions or queries they may have in real time, without having to wait on the phone or scheduling an appointment. This is especially important when onboarding new patients who will be unfamiliar with how your practice usually operates, and allows those who are manning the chat to create a relationship and rapport with them to enhance their experience.
Live chat also allows you to gain key insights into patient behavior that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to. You’ll have a better idea of the peak hours when patients visit the website and what the most common questions and concerns are.
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