This has big implications on the design, structure, and security of your intranet, and a redesign may be in your future if you want to make your intranet the go-to place for important information.

Join Geonetric and Patrick Moody, Director of Marketing and Public Relations at Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital, as he shares his recent intranet redesign story. With enhanced functionality, engaging content, and a responsive design, Henry Mayo’s new intranet has improved the user experience and user adoption.

Watch this webinar and learn how to:

• Prepare for an upcoming intranet redesign and use employee feedback to improve intranet features
• Meet the informational needs of various internal audiences
• Prioritize must-have functionality for your intranet, like calendar of events and employee recognition features
• Use the intranet to share important information with employees and reduce ignored emails
• Use real-life hospital intranet examples to guide your next redesign

Providers with formal agreements, partnerships, or other leadership roles within your organization may have certain ideas about where they should be listed in online search results. Yet, you must consider both the experience for the end user of your directory, as well as how you are going to comply with legal requirements such as Stark Laws.

As an organization who helps systems of all sizes effectively build and launch provider directories, here are some tips we’ve learned along the way that will help as you create a user-friendly — and provider-friendly — directory.

Understanding your organization is key
To begin, it’s important that you have a thorough understanding of the provider makeup of your organization. Learn as much as you can about the size and composition of your medical staff, including what partnerships are in place. Reach out to your physician relations team and key providers in leadership positions, to not only learn about your organization’s unique makeup, but to also get those important stakeholders on board early.

It’s also best to check with your legal team on questions concerning legal constraints that may limit your ability to provide special treatment for one non-employed doctor over another. While one provider may be a great partner and another may do little or no business with your organization, to stay in compliance, we always recommend that providers with similar status be handled consistently.

Always attempt to match your searcher’s query
When a health consumer visits your site and searches for a provider, they have certain expectations you need to meet. They might search by distance, by conditions the provider treats, by insurance, or by providers who are accepting new patients. Some of these factors might filter results, while others might best be implemented as prioritization and sorting elements. This search result is typically called “best match” and looks at the taxonomy terms entered in the search criteria and returns the best results first.

Your goal should always be to give the visitor the results that best match what they appear to be searching for.

But after taking search factors in consideration, how the results display are up to you — and the capabilities of your platform.

Ways to structure search results with fairness in mind
After the best match, most directories then apply either an alphabetical or random sort. Alphabetical results by provider’s last name is the most common way a directory lists results – but that certainly isn’t fair to your medical staff, especially those with last names toward the end of the alphabet.

There are many other ways to list results in a way that meets your users’ needs and is more fair to your providers. Some ways to answer this question:

• Randomization is good in many cases, and is certainly the most common across the industry, but it isn’t the only way.
• Some criteria can be used for sorting rather than filtering. Distance search is a great example. Your site could return all results within a particular distance of a given zip code or it could return all results ordered by distance with equidistant options then being sorted as discussed above.
• Some organizations show physicians with formal affiliation groups separately. For example, on a different tab or returning only affiliated providers and then requiring an additional click to “show all physicians”.
• VitalSite Provider Directory allows our clients to use SmartPanels and custom panels to display results based on sophisticated taxonomy filters. For example, Gundersen Health, headquartered in La Crosse, WI, uses panels to differentiate between onsite, visiting, and telemedicine providers at the Decorah, IA facility.
• You have the most flexibility with listings for your employed physicians. However, you do run the risk of alienating good partners who aren’t employed. Still, highlighting employed providers is common.
• Some organizations use special design treatments to draw attention to certain providers in search results, as Bryan Health, located in Lincoln, NE, did with their physician network and heart doctors.

Remember, you have the power to determine who you’re going to include in your directory. Non-employed providers without special status should be handled consistently, but you don’t need to include every provider in the U.S.

Search results and user confusion
What happens when a user runs a search query and sees five providers, clicks on one doctor, then goes back to the query? Do they see the same five providers in the same order or has it changed? What if they run a query today, and then come back and run the same query tomorrow? Are the results the same?

In our experience, we recommend that the results remain the same for the length of the session or until the visitor runs a new search, as this reduces user confusion. But a certain doctor who keeps refreshing the page until they see their name might not agree.

These scenarios illustrate the fact that many issues can come up when working through search results — as well as many solutions. Be sure to work with the team building your directory to understand how you will navigate some of these scenarios. When possible, always rule in favor or what creates the best experience for your site visitor.

Learning from search behavior
If you’re getting ready to embark on a provider directory redesign, take the time to focus on user search patterns and behavior. Learn how your site visitors use your current provider directory, taking special note of where they struggle.

Once you have a clear understanding of your users and their search behavior, you can build logic into your search functionality to help them get the most accurate results, while also meeting organizational goals such as favoring employed over non-employed providers.

If you have specific questions about your provider directory, or are looking for a new platform that better meets your needs, we’d be happy to help.

Legal actions against big brands has been a common tactic to raise awareness of the challenges of website accessibility and to encourage organizations to prioritize the costs and trade-offs of improved web accessibility. As far back as 2009, Target Corporation was sued for web inaccessibility. In more recent years, Universities such as Harvard and MIT have come under fire followed by online retailers such as Patagonia, Ace Hardware, Aéropostale and Bed Bath & Beyond. Healthcare has simply become the next industry to come under scrutiny at a time when the number of legal actions and threatened legal actions is rising dramatically.

What is Web Accessibility?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in places of public accommodation. ADA covers a long list of common disabilities including vision, hearing, cognitive, and motor skill impairments.

The ADA doesn’t specifically mention the digital world but, following the Target lawsuit, it has generally been considered to apply. Proposed changes in the ADA formalize the requirement for web accessibility.

It’s not always easy to see how these disabilities might impact a visitor’s experience with your website particularly for those not familiar with the functioning of assistive technologies. For example:

• Hearing impaired visitors can’t follow video assets without closed captioning or transcription
• Blind visitors using screen readers rely on a range of technical elements such as form tags to communicate important information about the page
• A visitor with Parkinson’s disease may have difficulty with some tasks requiring use of a mouse if they cannot be performed with a keyboard
• Text placed on top of images or patterned backgrounds may not be legible for colorblind visitors

What can organizations do to comply?

Lawsuits are happening today and all signs point to an increase in such actions over the next few years. With literally hundreds of possible accommodation options available, healthcare organizations should work with agencies with Accessibility professionals on staff, such as Geonetric, at least for an initial audit of your current level of accessibility compliance.

It’s also a good idea to familiarize yourself with the Web Content Accessibility Group (WCAG) 2.0 requirements.

Compliance programs typically have several phases.

• An initial audit to assess the current state of compliance and baseline against which to measure progress
• Recommended actions to improve the current accessibility compliance of the organization’s digital properties
• A work plan which prioritizes the recommendations and assigns ownership and timelines for completion
• An ongoing management plan which often includes training of content contributors to reduce the risk of introducing new accessibility issues in the future and annual reviews to assess progress and identify new compliance challenges and issues

Final Thoughts

Website accessibility has hit the front burner for many healthcare organizations because of these lawsuits. As we look at embracing accessibility for your organization, it’s important to remember that the reasons for treading this path go beyond risk management. Ultimately, making your web properties available to all visitors is the right thing for your organization to do, particularly for healthcare organizations. The organizations that we serve are driven in no small part by a mission to serve our patients and the community and this is an important part of that mandate.

That said, I spend lots of time researching and testing provider directories and I’ve noticed two things that the most successful ones tend to have in common.

1. Successful provider directories use search strategically.

The way your organization uses search in your provider directory should have a lot to do with the size of your organization. In fact, creating the optimal provider directory is as much art as it is science and varies a great deal based on the size of your organization, the number of providers represented, the geographic footprint served, and the data you have available.

Let’s look at how size makes a difference when it comes to provider directory search.

Smaller medical groups like Midwest Orthopedic Specialty Hospital offer an opportunity to streamline the experience by eliminating the need to search and making it easy to “dive deep” into the provider’s information.

Whereas the smaller groups can streamline and even eliminate search, large medical groups need options.

Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare offers three different ways to search depending on what a site visitor needs. While a health system with fewer providers should keep it simple, having a large medical staff means offering ways to focus and drill down.

You may want to include ways to filter the search results you receive like they do at Abington Jefferson Health.

In addition to size, it’s important to consider the different ways visitors use your provider directory. When someone searches for a provider by name, they likely have a relationship with that provider, so take them right to the profile.

When a visitor searches by specialty, they are probably looking for a new provider. Help them evaluate options by including lots of information in the search results page.

Wheaton Franciscan does a great job showcasing what providers offer night and weekend hours.

2. Successful provider directories invest in doctor profiles.

The provider profile is a great place to humanize your doctors.

In fact, offering compelling and engaging online provider profiles is one of the best ways to showcase your doctors in a unique and genuine way. A great place to invest: doctors’ biographies.

Bios should be more than just a name and a degree. You want to give health consumers the kind information that will allow them to make a good choice.

This example from Bronson Healthcare does a great job of building out the doctor’s profile, and showcases his approach to care, credentials, and videos.

Midwest Orthopedic includes videos and other elements to showcase the doctor’s passions and skills.

One size does not fit all.

There’s no one way to build the perfect provider directory and it may take some experimentation to find the one that’s right for you. But if you focus on the two key areas of search and provider profiles, you’ll be well on your way to building a provider directory that works for your site visitors.

To learn more about promoting your physicians’ online and see more examples of great provider directories in practice, check out our eBook or learn more about how we’ve solved these challenges with our provider directory software.