Everyone searches online for health information. How can you stand out in the crowd and bring value to your organization and website visitors?
It’s typical for hospitals and healthcare systems to invest in a digital patient education system, or syndicated health library on a website. A health library provides clinically reviewed patient education from a trustworthy source to your site visitors. It can help your patients understand health topics and take part in their care for better outcomes. Health library content is not brand-specific content developed by your internal writing team, but it can work successfully with your content.
Value of a Health Library
Use your health library to educate patients whenever they engage with your organization. Your health library can serve as:
- Personalized education during a patient’s appointment
- Access to health information during a patient portal visit
- Research and education resource during a website session
Website Approach
Effective integration of a health library can add significant value to your website and give your organization a competitive advantage by:
- Attracting new patients
- Boosting your brand’s trustworthiness
- Building patient loyalty and retention
- Delivering evidence-based health content
- Influencing health and wellness, behavior change, and condition management (population health management)
One of the keys to gaining value from your health library content is to make it a natural part of the patient journey. Connect it to the rest of your website presence rather than siloing it. This critical task may fall to you as a healthcare marketer or digital strategist.
Health Library Engagement
Take on the task of linking your website content with your health library proactively. Launching health library access on your organization’s website and then waiting for visitors to find and use it doesn’t initiate consumer engagement or generate enough traffic to justify the investment.
Promoting awareness of your health library through other channels may increase traffic, but it won’t enhance your user experience and translate into loyalty. After all, internet users can get free, reliable health information from popular sites like WebMD, National Institutes of Health, MedlinePlus, or Mayo Clinic. They don’t have to visit your website to learn about health topics or specific symptoms and conditions.
At this point, you may be wondering:
- How can we get our money’s worth out of a health library?
- How can a health library help us answer user questions and build trust with our target audiences?
- What should we do to make our health library a valued and seamless part of our website?
Follow our strategic approaches to achieve these goals.
Provide Seamless User Experience to Patients
Start by focusing on content, which helps you meet your organization’s goals and website users’ needs at the same time. Develop your content strategy with a seamless patient experience and content integration in mind.
Depending on your health library provider and license, your integration plans could use patient education in the following ways:
- Link conditions and treatments in page copy (especially on service line pages) to health library topics
- Enhance your in-house service line content pages by embedding content on the page
- Serve as your service line content in your branded format (Requires appropriate licensing with your health information vendor)
- Populate dynamic content (SmartPanels for VitalSite clients) to give users convenient access to:
- Related health library content to complement your medical services on service line pages
- Service line providers who specialize in the care and related service line events while viewing health library pages
- In the form of quizzes, interactive tools, and symptom checkers to evaluate and decide on next steps to seeking care and treatment or living a healthy lifestyle
- Embed videos or illustrations showing elective or common medical procedures
Content Unification
When your health content focuses on what your website visitors want to know, your organization will benefit from satisfied customers. Your health library will make sure you deliver:
- Easy to access patient education information
- Accurate explanations of conditions, treatments, and services
- Interactive involvement and management of personal health and wellness
- Reliable, up-to-date health information content
Let Us Help
Contact the Geonetric team if you need help creating a customized health library integration strategy for your hospital website.
