Navigating AI in Healthcare: Do’s and Don’ts for Your Website Content

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere—it touches your everyday life in ways you don’t even think about. Public awareness and opinions are still forming on how to use it and how comfortable people feel with it.

One thing is certain: AI will continue to seep into your personal and professional life. There are many AI content-creation tools, such as ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Bing Chat, to name a few. We recommend you start planning if, when and how your healthcare organization will allow it to affect your website’s content. It’s tricky once you begin.

Use a Human Approach to Ensure Accuracy & Trust

When taking advantage of AI to help develop your healthcare website content, you must use a careful approach to steer clear of pitfalls and make sure your users get accurate, reliable information. You’ll still need to do discovery and background work to use AI-generated content because AI has limitations. Right now, AI doesn’t:

  • Know your organization’s unique brand voice or competitive differentiators
  • Know your specific website audiences
  • Perceive human emotions and respond with empathetic, tailored content
  • Possess human creativity (it generates content based on patterns and data)
  • Understand and interpret complex medical topics as humans do

Successful web writers must foremost use their human characteristics and talent while considering the best way to benefit from AI strengths.

AI-Generated Content Dos & Don’ts

To use AI responsibly and guide your efforts, follow our dos and don’ts.

Do:

  • Do use AI to enhance the user experience – Engage with users and enhance loyalty by allowing AI to help you identify and produce valuable content that answers your users’ healthcare questions. This topic could be its own blog. For example, AI tools can help you create more personalized, valuable content that aligns with your user’s interests and needs. It can help ensure your content is well-written and user-friendly. AI can suggest content formats based on your user’s content consumption patterns, and much more.
  • Do confirm stakeholder buy-in – Get agreement from organizational, marketing or service-line leaders if you’re considering using AI-generated content as a starting point for your website.
  • Do ensure content is helpful, reliable and focuses on people first – Evaluate your AI-generated content using Google Search’s helpful content success qualities: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T)
  • Do analyze and edit the language – Edit the voice, tone, style and structure of the AI-generated content to represent your organization’s brand. AI-generated content won’t sound like your organization unless you give very specific and detailed prompts.
  • Do verify facts and information – Check the credibility of the AI source and look for gaps, errors or biases in the content. Ask your medical subject matter experts to review any AI-generated content to ensure accuracy.
  • Do adhere to evidence-based medical practices and guidelines – Align AI-generated content with established clinical guidelines and avoid advancing unproven treatments or misleading claims.
  • Do ensure strong content governance practices – Reduce the risks of using AI-generated content by creating policies that establish who’s responsible and accountable for AI output and which rules and regulations determine legal liability.

Don’t:

  • Don’t offer medical diagnoses – Direct website users to seek medical care from healthcare professionals for their symptoms rather than publishing AI-generated content that attempts to diagnose a medical condition and recommend treatment.
  • Don’t replace human experts – Complement your medical experts’ knowledge; don’t replace them with AI-generated content. Human experts are more credible than AI. Use their skills, experience and perspective to create unique content for your website.
  • Don’t engage in discriminatory practices – Ensure that AI-generated content avoids bias based on gender, race, ethnicity, or other protected characteristics.
  • Don’t ignore legal requirements – Comply with all applicable laws and regulations concerning healthcare, data privacy, and marketing to avoid legal liabilities and safeguard user data.
  • Don’t promote unproven treatments – Confirm AI-generated content complies with your organization’s ethical guidelines and standards. Avoid sharing medical content that’s vague, unverified or potentially harmful.

Use AI as a Tool

AI is a tool, not a solution to create website content you don’t have time to write. It can be helpful to streamline your work by generating ideas to begin the creative process, creating outlines and providing insight into questions users ask.

AI-driven healthcare website content requires a balance between innovation and accuracy to provide users with trustworthy and valuable information. Don’t take your responsibilities lightly. There are many pitfalls to relying solely on AI for your content strategy. Creating high quality content remains crucial to use the power and reach of these generative platforms, whether you use AI for a first draft or it’s human-created from start to finish.

If you’re already suffering from AI fatigue, contact the content strategists with the form below to learn how we develop user-focused, optimized website content that’s engaging, easy to read and aligns with your organizational strategy.

 

 

 

Content Governance: How to Get Control of Your Healthcare Web Content

Your website is constantly evolving, and that’s why having a governance framework is essential. Healthcare organizations like yours seek guidance on how to establish internal accountability, define roles, and assign decision-making authority. Content governance can help avoid confusion, keep your content current, get internal buy-in, and improve your digital experience.

Signs you need help

It’s common to feel that your content is in a constant state of chaos, but you don’t have to. Your organization would benefit from content governance if you:

  • Don’t have a consistent voice and tone throughout your website
  • Don’t know what content exists on your website
  • Struggle to maintain existing content
  • Experience delays in getting content published because of inefficient content development, editing, and review processes
  • Are unclear who approves the final content
  • Have pages that haven’t had an update in years
  • Have duplicate content
  • Grapple with too many urgent, high-priority content requests
  • Struggle to find content assets in your digital asset manager (DAM)

What is content governance?

Content governance is a plan to achieve your internal content strategy. It’s the framework that helps your team keep track of all the moving parts and determine how content gets created, reviewed, and published.

Benefits of governance

Maintaining good content on your website is vital to the user experience and your brand. It produces better results – for both end-users and your organization.

Internal benefits

Having a practical governance framework in place helps you:

  • Align content with overall strategic direction, brand voice, and goals
  • Increase productivity, accountability, and collaboration
  • Resolve conflicts and questions more quickly because you can refer to  agreed-upon procedures and direction
  • Build a scalable and repeatable content operation process  for current and future content contributors
  • Protect your content from internal requests that don’t meet the priorities of your target audiences
  • Reduce risk to reputation and legal status
  • Enhance brand with consistent, high-quality experiences across digital properties

Audience benefits

Governance helps you create a better user experience. When you implement a solid content governance plan, your website visitors may find it easier to:

  • Accomplish their top tasks
  • Get to know your brand
  • Know what to expect when they engage with your organization online
  • Find relevant, up-to-date information

Governance framework

The main components of content governance include people, process, documentation, and training. Let’s look at each more closely.

Cotent Governance Chart

People

The first element of the framework is the people. It:

  • Defines “who” and “what”
  • Establishes roles, responsibilities, and decision-making authority
  • Considers your core team, content contributors, and stakeholders

Process

Processes will get your team on the path to creating high-quality content with fewer delays, misunderstandings, and frustrations. Process:

  • Defines “when,” “where,” and “how” to get content moving through your organization efficiently
  • Establishes workflows related to planning, creating, publishing, and maintaining content

Documentation

Documents can pave the road for consistency and quality at your organization. Documentation:

  • Defines “why” and “how”
  • Establishes standards, policies, guidelines, and tools to encourage consistent, quality content
  • Serves as a “single source of truth” to resolve confusion or conflicts

Content documentation examples include:

Training

Training makes sure everyone has the information they need to put your governance plan into action. This piece of governance can include different types and levels of training depending on roles and responsibilities.

Training examples:

Where to start

In an ideal world, content governance starts early – before you begin writing content, designing layouts, uploading media, and publishing pages. However, your organization can benefit from moving forward with improving your governance anytime. Governance may fit seamlessly in your project timeline if you:

  • Are ready for a redesign
  • Hire a new team member
  • Have changes in your organization or brand
  • Have new content needs
  • Hear concerns or complaints from stakeholders
  • Implement new technology or features

Content governance tips

How to get started

As your website evolves, your governance plan should too. The key to getting started on developing or maturing your governance plan is to start by understanding where your team or organization is at today.

Contact us before you create your governance plan. Geonetric’s experts can facilitate discussions, share examples of approaches that have worked for other healthcare organizations, and help teams move governance documentation forward while still accomplishing day-to-day work.

Communicating to Your Internal Health Care Team About COVID-19 Vaccinations

Vaccinating healthcare workers and other segments of the population against COVID-19 will be the biggest public health effort of its kind in our history. Initially, there will be limited supply compared to the immediate, high demand. And distributing, storing, scheduling, vaccinating, and tracking is a huge task.

Early Access for Healthcare Workers

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) panel made recommendations in early December to give healthcare workers and long-term care facility residents the first vaccine doses.

There’s no question about the need to provide the nearly 21 million healthcare workers early access to the vaccine based on their exposure. The duty of communicating to them about the immunization process at your health system will fall to you as your organization’s communication team.

The CDC and its partners are already planning the vaccines’ delivery operations and recommended timelines. The government’s preplanning means the vaccine will roll out very quickly after FDA approval.

Is Your Internal Communication Plan Ready?

Reduce confusion and stop the inadvertent spread of misinformation with a solid internal communication plan about the vaccine. Make your organization the hub for accurate, timely messages.

Prepare communications now to:

  • Deliver messages of assurance about the availability of vaccines for your healthcare workers. Make sure staff know your organization is laying the groundwork to be able to vaccinate them quickly. Address questions like:
    • When you’ll receive doses
    • Which workers get priority
    • Will vaccination be required to work at your organization, or can they wait, or not get the vaccine at all
  • Educate staff about the vaccine you’ll offer, as well as the value and need to get vaccinated. Don’t assume just because your audience is healthcare workers that they trust the COVID-19 vaccine and want to get inoculated. Healthcare workers have the same concerns as the general population – see our tips for addressing vaccine objections.
  • Communicate how to get vaccinated at your organization. Share logistics, such as:
    • Location
    • Appointment scheduling
    • What to expect
    • Possible side effects
    • When and how to receive the second dose
  • Monitor the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine through
    • Internal monitoring and adverse events systems
    • Reporting vaccine safety and effectiveness to the CDC

Support Your Internal Team

As you know, this is a stressful time for healthcare professionals. Your staff will appreciate reminders about support and assistance in place to help them cope, such as:

  • Employee assistance program for short-term counseling, referrals, and follow-up services
  • Wellness programs
  • Community well-being resources

Plan for Quick, Reliable Communications

Throughout the pandemic, you’ve been able to identify the best channels to communicate with your internal audiences. Perhaps it’s your employee intranet, weekly publications, staff meetings, or regular emails. Many of our healthcare clients favor using their intranet for timely, cost-effective messaging.

Keep your messaging simple and easy to understand. Simple messaging helps stop misinformation from spreading. Timestamp your communications to allow people to easily identify the most current information.

Now is the time to start moving important vaccine information out quickly and effectively to your internal team. See additional tips for communicating to internal audiences during a public health crisis from March 2020.

Flexibility is Key

Creating and following a plan is hard when news about the vaccine approval and delivery changes day-by-day. Flexibility is key to reducing chaos. Arm your organization with accurate and timely information and ways to adjust messaging rapidly and delivery channels when needed.

Curate Your Messages

Anticipate the information your internal teams want to know about COVID-19 vaccines and communicate it proactively. Start with the CDC’s Frequently Asked Questions about COVID-19 Vaccination page.

If you need more insight, ask your front-line clinical leaders what questions or concerns they’ve heard from their teams about the COVID-19 vaccination. You could also use keyword research to guide your question development. Possible questions include:

  • If you’ve had the coronavirus and recovered, do you still need to get the vaccine?
  • Can I get COVID-19 from the vaccine?
  • Is the vaccine safe for pregnant or breastfeeding women, or women planning to become pregnant?
  • How long after vaccination before you develop immunity?

Evolving Action Plans & Updates

As vaccine information evolves, continue to update your internal team on topics such as:

  • Action plans – Detail what your organization is doing to ensure easy access to the vaccine, timing, and other measures to keep staff safe. Remember to update staff about your successes to build support and compliance.
  • Supply status – Communicate your vaccine supply status, so people know what is available and when. Clarify how you’re working with the government or suppliers to get the vaccine.
  • Staffing updates – Continue to inform your team on what they can expect regarding staffing during the inoculation period and your staff expectations.

Open the Door to Questions

Questions will arise even with the most informative communication plan. Listen and try to understand concerns about the vaccines. Use your intranet or a dedicated email to allow employees to submit vaccine questions and get answers promptly.

To save your team from answering questions more than once, create informative content on your intranet with answers to the most common questions. Most of the time, we favor this approach over creating Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages. However, a prioritized list of fewer than 20 questions and answers could be useful for your staff.

Inform Staff About Your Public Messaging

Be transparent about the messages your organization is releasing to patients, the community, and the media. This helps your internal team share correct information with the public. Your internal teams will value hearing from you first, not from news stations or social media.

As your plan for providing vaccines to the public firms up, update your staff about their involvement. This will prepare them for their participation in your plans. Vaccination education might be necessary to train staff to answer questions from people receiving the vaccine.

Contact Us to Help Your Team

Reach out to Geonetric for content services to support your team’s response to the coronavirus. And explore our COVID-19 resources hub.

Connect with Maternity Patients Concerned About the Coronavirus

What Moms-To-Be Want to Know

Figure out what your maternity patients want to know about the coronavirus and pregnancy. Coronavirus is a huge search topic right now. Look at online sources to help focus concerns for expecting moms. Consider:

And use your organization’s providers as local experts. Talk to your OB-GYNs and midwives to find out what questions their patients are asking them.

Strengthen Your Content Marketing Assets

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pregnant women should protect themselves from COVID-19. People look for information to reduce anxiety. Content marketing during a crisis can educate and improve patient trust in your organization.

Reference search trends and resources, and apply your marketing knowledge to create a list of pregnancy and COVID-19 related blog topics or content marketing hub articles. Answer questions people are asking, such as:

  • Can becoming ill with COVID-19 increase my risk of miscarriage?
  • Is it safe to deliver my baby in a hospital now? Should I change my labor and delivery plans?
  • How does COVID-19 change prenatal and postpartum care visits?
  • If I get COVID-19 while I’m pregnant, can I pass it to my unborn baby?
  • Will I be tested for COVID-19 when I’m admitted for labor and delivery?

Draw Attention to Care & Safety Changes

Your organization and moms-to-be have the same priority – a safe and healthy pregnancy and delivery. Most hospitals and health care systems have modified their prenatal care because of COVID-19. Send updates to patients about care or process changes to:

  • Expand infection-control practices and safety measures to protect mothers and newborns
  • Replace some in-person prenatal care visits with telephone and virtual visits for women with low-risk pregnancies
  • Increase waiting room precautions (masks) and procedures
  • Provide wearable home monitoring devices for women with high-risk pregnancies and those who face barriers to accessing prenatal care
  • Move preparedness education classes online
  • Limit support people present during birth
  • Restrict visitors
  • Shorten the length of hospital stays

Informing patients about changes is relatively easy with established communication channels. Reach your patients through your patient portal, website, email, and social media. Consider using live, online chat sessions with your experts to answer maternity patient questions and ease fears. They will appreciate the fact that you’re addressing their needs with patient-friendly, practical solutions.

Reassure & Prepare Worried Patients

Giving birth during COVID-19 is an unfamiliar experience and comes with anxieties and expectations. First-time moms and moms with other children may be facing a different birthplace experience than they anticipated. Help reduce the unknown as much as possible by communicating exactly what patients will experience, step-by-step, when they come to deliver their baby. Emphasize the safety of mom, partner, baby, and staff.

Offer Facts to Make Informed Care Choices

Concerns about COVID-19 and visitor restrictions are making some pregnant women reconsider giving birth at a hospital. Explain why hospitals are a safer option for the mother and baby when giving birth. Explain that you have advanced technology and expert providers available to care for any problems during labor and delivery and after. Deliver easy-to-understand messages written in plain language so women can make informed choices about their care.

Extend Mental Well-Being Support

It’s normal for pregnant women to feel overwhelmed by the challenges COVID-19 brings to their pregnancy and newborn care. Provide patients with ways to manage their feelings, such as:
• Linking them to your online support groups or one associated with a national organization
• Offering digital wellness resources through your website to support lifestyle changes, mental health, self-care, and stress relief
• Highlighting the availability of referrals for therapy and counseling if needed

Highlight Community Outreach & Convenient Care

Community outreach, education, and care programs that impact maternal health and prenatal care are a focus of many hospitals and health care systems. Meeting pregnant women in their communities to provide for their health care needs is one way to ensure they continue to get the care they need. Publicize your efforts towards home health, mobile health, digital community education, and convenient services women can get within their communities or through telemedicine.

Make Childbirth a Joyful, Positive Experience

Remember, childbirth is one of the most memorable experiences of parents’ lives. Continue to celebrate bringing a new baby into the world – even during a pandemic. Focus on the important aspects of a safe and healthy delivery and newborn bonding. Craft messages that assure patients they will receive the same exceptional care during COVID-19 as they would any other time.

Share Experiences

Relieve pregnant women’s fears with patient and provider stories. Share narratives from maternity nurses about the care they give and from maternity patients who praise your hospital for the amazing care and successful delivery of their babies during COVID-19.

Avera Health wrote a patient story about two separate moms’ insights on their recent deliveries. Although they acknowledged their worries and disappointments dues to Avera policy changes due to COVID-19, they also share how they had good experiences even though it wasn’t what they originally imagined.

Cone Health created two patient birth stories. One story is about the early delivery of a mother’s first baby. The other tells the story of a mom who had pregnancy complications before and after birth.

Connect with Your Patients

Be a trusted source of information and support for your maternity patients during COVID-19 and they won’t forget your messaging during this challenging time.

If you need help creating compelling digital content that connects with your target audiences, contact Geonetric.

Lessening the Fears of Patients Who Need Essential Treatments During COVID-19

Still, some patients may consider whether they should risk exposure to COVID-19 by going to treatment at a hospital or outpatient facility.

Many health care professional groups and associations have put out recommendations about treatments, therapies, and surgeries for patients. For many patients, delays can be detrimental and make treatment less effective. The National Kidney Foundation urges kidney disease patients not to skip their regular dialysis treatments. And the American Society of Clinical Oncology does not recommend changing or withholding cancer therapies.

Ultimately, decisions about postponing necessary treatments and therapies should be made on an individual basis with a patient’s doctor.

Some patients may have to be hospitalized if that is the safest way for them to get treatment and monitoring for their condition, if they have waited too long for care, or if they have COVID-19 symptoms along with their chronic condition.

Protecting At-Risk Patients

Patients with cancer, kidney disease, multiple sclerosis, or a transplanted organ are at higher risk if they get COVID-19. That’s because of their health condition, a weakened immune system from treatments and medications, coexisting conditions, or donated organs that do not work as efficiently as they should.

If any critical treatments or therapies are available through your home health care services, highlight the benefits to your patients of receiving care and medical supplies at home. Support from home health providers can keep patients safer and healthier.

Patients with chronic conditions need the most protection and reassurance during a pandemic. Coping with cancer and other diseases and worrying about the coronavirus can be overwhelming. They need support. Making them feel comfortable is an essential part of being a health care communicator.

Outreach & Advice from a Trusted Source

Your patients need to know what is true and what isn’t true, and how your organization is caring for patients with chronic conditions. They will value information from you because they trust your organization and providers.

Your primary care providers and specialists might want to begin outreach with these patients, so they don’t slip through the cracks. Use your electronic health records tool, a phone visit, or telemedicine services to connect, answer questions, and put them at ease with their care plan and treatments. During these touchpoints, be sure your providers encourage patients to seek emergency care for their condition if needed. This keeps your patients in the decision-making process for their health care and mental well-being.

Information Can Reduce Patient Anxiety

Patients may worry about the safety of necessary care. As a health care communicator, you’ll need to be transparent and share comprehensive information with your patients to lessen their concerns. Craft messages about:

  • Patient safety as your organization’s number one priority – Enforce face coverings at all times and social distancing in the hospital or health system’s facilities. If some locations have different rules, explain why and what differences exist.
  • Infection prevention measures at your facilities – Outline cleaning and disinfecting practices your organization has put into practice to prevent infection spread. If you are using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s infection prevention guideline, be sure to mention that detail.
  • Prescreening procedures – Let your patients know the appointment prescreening processes you are using before they come to your location. This may include phone screening and public entrances screening before allowing patients to enter your hospital or clinic. If employee protocol is different, explain those precautions, too. Make sure patients know your procedures apply to all patients and employees, so they feel safe receiving care from your health care professionals.
  • Surges in virtual visits – In-person appointments have gone down during COVID-19 temporary closures, and telemedicine usage is up. Explain to nervous patients that this means fewer people are coming through your doors and, therefore, the disease is less likely to spread. Lower patient volume gives your organization time to clean, disinfect, and screen visitors as a way to keep everyone safer.
  • Treatment of COVID-19 patients – If you are treating many patients with COVID-19, your other patients may wonder if they are safe when they come to your facilities. If you have a separate unit or area and staff for treating COVID-19 patients, explain the separation of those patients from other patients and other specific precautions you are taking.
  • Visitor restrictions – Make your visitor restrictions clear. If family or caregivers are not allowed to accompany patients to their treatments, tell the patient during prescreening. Explain how your limits help keep everyone safe by exposing fewer people to the person-to-person spread of the infection.
  • Curbside services – If any of your locations provide curbside services, such as pharmacy or home medical equipment pickup, let patients know they won’t have to risk exposure to COVID-19 to get what they need.
  • Contactless, digital payments – Online bill pay isn’t new, but it’s more popular than ever because it reduces the need for patients to interact with staff. Let patients know where to find access to your online bill pay services.

There are many risks during a pandemic; information can bring relief to patients. Regular communication is key.

Contact Us to Help Your Team

Reach out to Geonetric for content services to support your team’s response to the coronavirus. And explore our COVID-19 resources hub.

Combine Your Website Content and Health Library for Maximum Results

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

LMH Health – Lawrence Neurology Specialists Health Library Example
A well thought out strategy helps keep your patients interested and engaged in your content and on your website. Take your content integration plan a step further by customizing specific website copy to align with consumers’ interests in your area or trending news topics.

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.

Planning a Redesign? Start With Content Strategy

Content & User Experience

A good user experience depends on quality content. Content is the reason users come to your website. Count anything on your website—text, images, audio, and video—that communicates a message to your audience as content.

When you let content guide your website redesign, you give users valuable information and improve the overall user experience. This strategic approach can help your brand and website stand out. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, a leader in user experience research, “User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”

Take advantage of your healthcare website redesign process to deliver a better digital user experience. Content plays an important role in your user experience and informs design and functionality by presenting text that is:

  • Organized with meaningful messages
  • Easy to read and scannable
  • User focused and benefit driven
  • Optimized for conversion with calls to action

When you get the user experience right, you’re building a relationship and becoming a trusted source of information and services. That means your users will turn to your website instead of a competitor’s site.

What’s Driving Your Website Redesign?

Start your planning process with a clear understanding of what you want to achieve with your redesign. Your website objectives may include:

  • Improving user experience
  • Establishing governance
  • Aligning with changing business goals
  • Implementing a new content management system
  • Shifting from locations focus to a system-wide approach

Craft a Core Strategy Statement

Once you understand the purpose of your redesign, write a core strategy statement for your project to keep you focused throughout the process. Your statement will help you define the purpose of your website and explain it to others in your organization.

Use your core strategy statement to support the content strategy and development choices you make. Refer to your statement to discourage requests that don’t match your purpose and could sidetrack your project.

Figure Out the Goals for Your Redesign

Invite your stakeholders to give you feedback on your current website content and site structure. Ask:

  • What’s working well?
  • What needs improvement?
  • Who’s the target audience? Are there other audiences?
  • What are the top tasks for your audiences?
  • What are our organizational strengths or competitive advantages?
  • What goals do you have for a redesigned website?
  • How will you know if the website redesign is a success?

The insights you gain from your stakeholders should influence your site structure, content strategy, and content development. Whatever the reasons for your redesign, developing good content is critical to achieving success.

When you identify new goals for your website redesign, make sure your content strategy and development address them. For example, if your healthcare system is integrating its medical group into the organization’s main website, you’ll need a comprehensive strategy for how to add the medical group information and create content about the medical group and doctor profiles.

Evaluate Your Current Content

Run an inventory and audit of your current website’s content. After you have a good understanding of your existing content, decide if it content aligns with your redesign goals and speaks to your target audience. Review:

  • Calls to action
  • Page structure and linking
  • Relevance
  • Search engine optimization (SEO) and metadata
  • Use of videos, PDFs, and images
  • Voice and tone

After your content audit, you’ll be able to identify content gaps and opportunities for streamlining or creating content during your redesign. For example, if some content is old or outdated, archive it. Or if medical service lines are missing, add them.

Analyze Your Website Data

Dig into the data from your current website to determine which content and calls to action are engaging your site users. What are the most popular pages? What are users searching for on your site? How do users find your website? Google Analytics or similar tools can help you track this information. Tools like heat maps, scroll maps, user testing, and more can help you understand user behavior.

Apply what you learn from your analysis to your content strategy. When you make decisions based on data, not hunches, you can meet your organization’s goals and provide users with easy access to the content they need.

For example, if you find that urgent care has a high number of page views, consider this data and your other marketing goals to help determine if your urgent care service line and locations need a larger presence on your website. Focusing your content strategy and aligning it with your business goals can help increase conversions and revenue.

Organize Your Content

Content strategy ensures your website has a structure that supports your goals, addresses the needs of your target audiences, and supports user tasks.

Make your website navigation straightforward and easy for users to follow. Label navigation items clearly, using terms your target audience understands. Group related items together in a navigation structure so the users can see the relationships and make the correct choices.

Prioritize the needs of your users by organizing content in a way that makes sense to a patient, instead of following your internal department structure. And make high-priority content easy to find.

Plan & Create the Right Content

A content-heavy website doesn’t always translate into useful information to your user. Just because you can publish pages of information doesn’t mean you should. Before you create any content, determine its purpose and target audience, as well as the message you want to convey. Make sure your content is compatible with your site’s core strategy statement and goals.

Consider whether you need to rewrite, revise, or create new content for your redesign. You may need a combination of these approaches. At a minimum, you’ll want to update and refresh your content for:

If you don’t have the time, web expertise, or resources to tackle comprehensive content strategy and content development during your website redesign, collaborate with Geonetric.