eHealth Articles & White Papers

Tips for Connecting with Seniors Online

Ben Dillon - Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

Many hospitals are not engaging seniors online as effectively as they could be. Perhaps some hospital marketers think seniors represent an insignificant percentage of their online audience while others may not know how to make their websites more accommodating to seniors.

The fact is, a third of seniors are online and when they are online, 79 percent search for health information. That's a significant number.

Seniors represent a diverse audience with varied needs. Their physical capabilities, interests, and information needs vary across the senior age spectrum as well as by income, education and psychographic profile. You can make your website better align with the different ways seniors use the Web and the types of information they seek by making a few simple changes:

Extend current senior engagement programs online

If your hospital publishes a newsletter that is of interest to seniors, add some of the content online. Be sure to refer to the online component of the newsletter in the hard copy to drive your audience to your site. Create an online discussion for the popular topics so seniors can connect to one another.

Examples of how to extend current community engagement programs online include:

• Article archives
• E-mail delivery option for publications
• Online discussions

Tie in traditional interaction points

Some senior users are more comfortable completing interactions offline rather than online, so be sure that appropriate phone numbers and addresses for each function are easy to find.

Cover topics in which seniors are interested

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation seniors have a particular interest in information on diseases, prescription drugs, nutrition, and payers (including Medicare and Medicaid).

Accessibility is more important for senior audiences

As people age, there are common areas that present greater challenges, including vision issues, a reduction of fine motors skills and cognitive issues. One of the most notable cognitive issues includes managing the recall of information at the same time that you're recognizing and processing new information. Some tips for addressing these issues and making your website more accessible:

• Vision:
  - Use fonts that are resizable in the browser (no pixel-sized fonts)
  - Use high contrast between font colors and backgrounds
  - Avoid the use of color and small images to convey information
  - Avoid the use of movement or animation of visual elements
• Motor skills:
  - Avoid items that require precise fine motor skills such as "fly-out" menus, small clicking targets (such as very small buttons), and double-clicking
• Web-related cognitive skills:
  - Use strong navigation cues
  - Use breadcrumb trails and other visual cues to let visitors know where they are in the site
  - Use prominent "next" and "previous" buttons for multi-page content
  - Minimize the use of scrollbars (yes, vertical scrollbars are often ignored by seniors too)

Being senior-friendly will pay off

Seniors are an important audience that shouldn't be ignored. Hospitals need to make a targeted effort to engage this audience online. This means considering them and their needs in your site's design and ensuring your site's content is appealing to them.

Seniors are a critical part of your patient mix and the relationships you build online with them now will only gain value as the Web becomes a bigger factor with this audience.