Why You Need a Healthcare Website

If you want to grow your medical practice, you need to set up a healthcare website. Having a website can help you grow your practice and business so that you can reach your goals.

Your website can help you with a few things, but you need to develop your site correctly. As long as you make your site easy to use and navigate, you can enjoy a few benefits.

Consider a few excellent reasons to invest in healthcare web development.

Attract New Patients

One of the best ways to get new patients is to use digital marketing, and your website plays a big role in that. You can optimize your website for search engines so that you show up when people search for a doctor in your city.

If someone is looking for a new doctor, they may click on your website. Then, they can learn about your practice and specialty, and you can lead them to a page on your site to contact you and schedule an appointment.

You can also use social media to drive website traffic to your booking or contact page. Social media platforms come and go, but you own your website, so it can serve as the perfect digital home base for your marketing.

Connect With Current Patients

If you already have patients, you can also use your healthcare website to connect with them. More and more practices are setting up patient portals where people can view lab results and send you a secure message.

As you design your site, you can account for a patient portal in the plan and budget. Then, you’ll have an easy way to communicate back and forth with your patients.

This can be especially helpful if you don’t always have time to call people. Sending a message can be much faster, and your patients can respond when they have time.

Manage Your Content

Regardless of how you use your website, be sure you use a content management system (CMS). You can use a CMS to manage, organize, and publish new content on your website.

That can make it much easier to publish a new blog post, for example. You can also make other small changes without having to hire a website development professional for every little thing.

A CMS empowers you to make updates to your website, even if you’re not a developer. That way, if you ever need to change your hours or share another change, you can do so quickly.

Healthcare Web Development Best Practices

There are many website development best practices, but healthcare websites have even more. Before you design your website, make sure it complies with the law.

You should also ensure the website will be easy for you, your team, and your patients to use. That way, everyone will be able to enjoy the benefits of a good healthcare website.

Here are some best practices to keep in mind.

HIPAA Compliance

You can use your website primarily for marketing your practice. However, you need to be careful when setting up a patient portal or even when sharing testimonials from your patients.

As a healthcare provider, you need to comply with HIPAA as well as the HITECH Act. HIPAA serves as the basis for keeping patient data safe, and HITECH adds more technology-specific rules.

Whether you design the site or hire someone, you need to protect any patient health information (PHI) that you include. Adding a secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate is a start, but you may need to go further.