Focus

Tips to Creating Your Website

Increase of internet users and medical tourism are pushing healthcare frontrunners to make a statement online. Nancy Singh browses through the web-world to tell you why you should log-in fast

Type 'healthcare' as the key-word and Google gives you over 1,32,000,000 results. Welcome to the world of internet. A magical place where 'your wish is web's command'. A place which is almost becoming like your 'family doctor' that suggests, advices and even tells you places which you should not be going to.

Just re-collect top five hospitals in India that are aggressive on the medical tourism front and 100 per cent chance that they have an excellent presence on the web. On the other side of the spectrum, in our country, there still exist hospitals that still do not even have a website of their own! It is these ignorant lot or rather the 'old-timers' who need to log in to actually realise how strategically important it is to have a good website, as, in the future it can even mean their survival.

Strategic Tool

If you are smart healthcare personnel, whatever is going to be said is nothing new, for you must be already aware of the benefits of online marketing. An online presence is most important in healthcare sector than any other. Here's why. In healthcare, any kind of advertising comes under strict restrictions and word-of-mouth is the most effective way to establish yourself. People indeed ask for opinions from other people like them. Be it choosing a doctor, a medical procedure, hospital, or a healthcare plan, it is a 'big' decision, and hence the more opinions they gather, the more secure they feel with their ultimate choice. Hence, your medical website plays the crucial bridge through which you can directly reach your service-beneficiary as and when they need you. Information on the web is a key to the internet-savvy customer today. Especially, the younger lot first 'googles' healthcare options in very much the same way as they would shop for retail products, and they indeed expect to find answers online. The Extras

In today's digital world, websites play an extremely important strategic role for every sector industry or business, but for the hospitals it has some added benefits.

"Website is the only platform to network to the international market" - Jerry Philip Manager-Business Development and Quality Systems KIMS, Thiruvananthapuram

"We carefully choose colour palettes for the designs within the hospital and refrain from using surgical image" - Deepak Sahni Founder & Managing Director Sai Web Tel Limited, Chennai

"The internet has brought about a paradigm shift in the way the medical community deals with information" - Dr Nicky Tejwaney Founder ToubibInTechnology

Networking Platform: A simple, brochure website will help in letting the online world know that you exist. It also will say what you do and where to find you. It is as important as your home address. Says Deepak Sahni, Founder and Managing Director of Sai Web Tel Limited, a leading website designing company that specialises in healthcare, "It is the only platform to portray your experience in terms of success and specialties with the names of the doctors and their experiences. It is most often seen that people search doctors' name to find as to which hospital he/she is associated with." Sai Web Tel has designed many of the best hospitals in the country that includes names like Paras Hospitals, Max Healthcare, Artemis Hospital, Rajeev Gandhi Cancer Institute and Batra Hospital, amongst many others. It started off when a senior orthopaedician from Apollo approached the founder and expressed the fact that his profession does not allow him to promote himself and he desires to endorse his joint treatments internationally.

"After promoting this website for services like knee replacement, hip replacement and sports injury treatments, it resulted in good footfall of prospective international patients on website. This was way back in 2000, when medical tourism was not even familiar to anyone in India," shares Sahni. Incidentally, today, Apollo receives the highest number of international patients in the country. "Website is the only platform to network with the international market. We have made special efforts to make our website as simple and user-friendly as possible for our patients abroad," agrees Jerry Philip, Manager-Business Development and Quality Systems, Kerala Institute of Medical Sciences, Thiruvanathapuram.

Staffing Solutions: A good hospital website helps attract good staff, as the job-seeking nurse and speciality doctor would always like to know the kind of team and the work-place that he/ she would be working at. A good website plays a strategic role in pooling the best talent. Hence, on the website, many HR departments always display 'feel- good' pictures and content, about the positives of working with their respective organisations.

Advertising Delight: Adver-tisement in papers cannot just detail or convey what a single testimonial video on the website can do. As for TV, none of the hospitals can be seen using TV as an advertising medium as it's too expensive and there are regulatory hurdles. Other available mediums like brochures and newsletters have limitations to provide information, which a prospective patient would like to know about the hospital. This is where websites plays a very important role. One hospital that has taken web's role very seriously is Wockhardt Hospitals. Its website, www.wockhardthospitals.net bagged the the best 'International Hospital Website for Patient Information' by Consumer Health World Awards held at Las Vegas last year. The website has unique features like 'live webchat', testimonial videos of patient experiences, a query option to get a no-obligation second opinion from expert doctors and a credit card payment gateway for easy money transfer.

Apollo Hospital: You can view latest videos about the hospital

"The primary reason for designing this website was to inform, educate and empower our potential international patients and their families, by offering them comprehensive information to make an informed decision," says Vishal Bali, CEO, Wockhardt Hospitals Group. There is a special section for international patients that has many useful resources like information on travel and tourism, visa and hotels that helps patients to plan the next steps and make a decision. Most of the important links on this website are on the home page in a web-portal like format so that the visitors do not have to navigate too much. Apart from the website, Wockhardt got sophisticated web-based CRM software installed. The group even set up a video channel on popular broadcasting site -YouTube where more than 40 videos about the hospital group, patient testimonials and media stories can be viewed.

Today, it is not the only one doing so. Be it Apollo, Max, or Fortis, you will find them all on YouTube. Quips Sahni, "We have experienced that CEOs or MDs who are young or tech savvy do take this as their biggest marketing tools, whereas traditional, semi-private or other hospitals still do not take it as a priority."

Operations: On the administrative side, patients can fix appointments with their doctors by filling online forms. An online patient referral system can help in effectively communicating all the patient details to the other end. Online consultations, though not very popular in India, is very common in the west. Information about patient's health status can be retrieved online using a secure login. Web forums and support groups on various health conditions are also highly popular in the West. Though, in our India too, there are still a few private doctors who have highly sophisticated websites where patients can chat online and fix-up appointments.

Paras Hospital has the USP of being the first hospital to be NABH accredited in Haryana. So, it highlights that on the website

Wockhardt Hospital won the 'Best Website Award for International Pateints'

Take for instance, Dr Rajesh Shah, a highly successful homeopath who has international patients worldwide. He has gone to great lengths in creating a very comprehensive, informative and interactive website (www.rajeshshah.com). You can chat with his secretary and fix up appointment online24-7. "Thanks to website and its infinite possibilities, sometimes, I am able to treat patients across all the five continents in a day. It's quite amazing!" he exclaims.

A Graphical Library: Websites help to give a graphic / pictorial view of various health related topics without going for expensive books. Health-related animations and videos on the web are now very popular. Says Dr Anoop Agarwal, Founder-Director of Thiruvananthapuram-based Medical Website Designing, "Informational or educational content on medical websites help in patient / public education, which by itself can be a strong marketing tool." He is a practicing doctor who accidentally became a designer! He first started off with the objective of designing websites for his own group of medical professionals and the voluntary organisations that he is associated with. But with rising popularity, it became a commercial start-up.

A Global Village: Internet has merged all physical boundaries and made physical presence virtually non-existent. It has resulted in redefining 'social networking'. But it not only, youngsters who are riding high in this wave of 'orkut' and 'facebook' days, but thousands of doctors in the medical fraternity also blog and remain in touch with each other, through this powerful medium. It is a very well established trend in the West. On the same lines, very recently, a new website, ToubibIn has been launched in India. Says Dr Nicky Tejwaney, Founder, ToubibInTechnology, "The internet has brought about a paradigm shift in the way the medical community deals with information. Internet platforms such as ToubibIn expedite knowledge sharing and learning, resulting in better treatment for patients. Besides connecting with peers, internet serves as an effective education tool, especially for next generation doctors."

What Makes a Good Website?

Being attached to one's life directly, medicine is not only niche, but a very sensitive issue of personal concern to everyone. Because of which, there are many things to be kept in mind while designing a medical website from navigation to proper placement of links, using the right images, planning the right text, making the site user friendly, using right fonts which are easy-to-read and soothing backgrounds.

"Medical website design has a very different approach in the process of designing. Important elements are selected on the basis of patient approach, like finding top 10 things that a prospective patient would like to see, followed by what needs to be as links, what needs to be a highlighted and banner selection of images which gives relaxing and rejuvenation impacts. We carefully choose colour palettes for the designs within the hospital, doctors' colour themes and refrain from using surgical images," shares Sahni.

Doctor's information, OPD timings, education and right picture selection are also some of the aspects which need to be specially taken care of. Elaborates Dr Agarwal, "The basic principles and technologies of medical website designing are more or less the same. But, the outcome has to be different. Sound medical knowledge is imperative in good medical website designing."

Providing a process and step-by-step approach is the most important key in a good hospital website, which means making a prospective patient take a de-tour throughout the website, so that h/she knows what the next step is and how to finally contact the hospital.

Overcoming the Challenges

If you look at the international scene, especially the developed countries, not only healthcare institutions but even individual doctors have their own practice websites. This is mainly because, in the west people rely heavily on the internet to find the best products and services they want, closest to their location, at the most affordable costs. But in India, the internet using population is still only around five percent, which too, confined mainly to the big cities. "I see that even in the metros doctors are not very net savvy. I know a number of doctors who do not even have an email address," reacts Dr Agarwal.

From the web-designing market perspective, in India, it is still a nascent market. The best orders are outsourced from abroad. The global economic slowdown has affected this a lot. Authenticity and accuracy of information is a further challenge for medical website designing, with all the counterfeit sites mushrooming all over the web today. "Another big challenge is to make the general public as well as the medical community fully aware of the great potential of the web. And lastly, we Indians have the habit of praising first, complaining next and not making payment on time," smiles Dr Agarwal.

However, with newer generations of tech-savvy doctors and growing awareness amongst healthcare professionals that the internet is indeed the best medium to target the upwardly mobile upper middle-class population, there is a positive a trend seen of hospitals demanding a good website.

In the medical world there is a phrase called 'publish or perish' which means if you want to be recognised you have to get your latest research work published or else you perish. Probably, the phrase of the future would be 'publish (online) or perish'.

nancy.singh@expressindia.com