Physician and Patient Portals are nice...but don't forget about attracting New Patients!

[Christopher Boyer]

With the proposed healthcare reform changes looming, more and more hospitals are actively creating online patient and physician portals.

Operationally, this makes sense - integrating EMR access to existing patients helps with operational efficiencies, can increase patient satisfaction (that is, for those patients that feel comfortable using the internet to share their medical records) and potentially qualify hospitals for some much-needed financial relief.

Additionally, the efforts to create transactional physician portals by offering them a protected site to share restricted information, schedule OR's, etc. is a great way to enhance physician loyalty in a rapidly competitive environment.

While both patient and physician portals are important for a hospital to include as part of their online presence, it's important not to forget about the most basic of web platforms: your hospital's "new consumer portal" (aka, your hospital website).

Often, hospital's public websites take third priority when determining where to spend rapidly dwindling "online" budgets. Partly due to the fact that hospital websites are owned by the hospital IT department or the marketing staff. And both departments struggle with seeing a hospital website as a business development tool.

This is a dangerous mistake (particularly with the rise in healthcare consumers using the internet to seek out health information).

Luckily, all it takes are a few simple changes to begin converting your hospital website to a "new patient portal" (see my previous post of the Whys, Hows and Whats of a Hospital Website for a start). By changing the perception of your hospital website to a "new patient portal", IT staff and marketers can begin realizing a return on investment of their online marketing activities.

Remember, the type of people searching for healthcare online are searching with intent...and they are the types of people that hospital's should be attracting - insured, employed and interested in your hospital's services.

With the economic pressures being faced your hospital this year, can you afford not to dedicate a significant part of your online marketing efforts to growing new business?

Your thoughts? Please comment below or tweet me at: www.twitter.com/chrisboyer.