Guidelines for updating common website sections

Home Page

If you have a “what’s new” or “practice news” section on your homepage, please keep it new! If the last entry is from last year, you absolutely need to update it. Aside from that, your homepage is pretty self sufficient. If you have a new product or service you want to promote, the homepage is the best place to do that. You can also announce new doctors or new locations opening up.

Physician(s)

Did you know that the Physician section is usually the second most viewed section of your website, after your homepage? People want to know about their doctor before going to see them. This page is crucial for patients that have been referred to your practice and are using your website to evaluate you before making the decision to get an appointment. You can enhance bios by adding additional photos, personal quotes, video intros, or even patient testimonials. It is additional work, but it makes a difference! Prospective patients are reading these. (Tip: It is good practice to also add Nurse Practitioners and possibly Physicians Assistants to your site.)

Location(s)

Your locations page has to be up to date or patients and others viewing the site will not have your correct information. The main locations page is always in the top five most viewed pages of the website because many patients. The key items of information are:

  • address
  • phone number / fax number
  • office hours
  • optional – providers that practice at that location

Help Desk and Forms

The most common item that practices forget to update is one of the most important – your patient forms! Open up those pdf’s in your patient resources/ help-desk and forms pages and make sure everything looks current. Be sure to double check all the pages on which the patient forms are listed because you may have different form versions linked from different parts of your site.

Medical Services

This section will not change unless you have added some new services to your practice. Usually, this section doesn’t need too much watering, unless you are doing some heavy search engine optimization on your site. If you are interested in optimizing your site based on key words related on conditions you treat or procedures you perform, then regularly updating this section with key word rich content is critical.

Patient Education

If you have the Omedix Patient Education library, you need to do nothing here except ponder whether to change the featured articles. If you are linking to outside sources for patient education then you can double check the links and add or remove links as necessary. Overall, I would say that if you are just doing the twenty minute check, you can leave this section alone.

Patient Portal and Online Requests

Another improvement you might consider, if you don’t have these already, is adding online forms or a patient portal secure messaging system to your website. These can help you reduce incoming phone volume for basic requests and make interacting with your practice much more convenient for the patient.

The main difference between online forms and a patient portal is this:

  • Online forms will allow patients to submit a request online, but you will have to call them back over the phone.
  • The patient portal let’s you email/secure message the patient back instead of making a phone call.

Examples of what a patient can do through a patient portal include:

  • Online appointment requests
  • Online Rx renewal
  • Online bill pay
  • Requesting lab results
  • Asking a billing question
  • Asking a question about an upcoming procedure
  • Any other common request they would otherwise do over the phone.

If you would like to learn more about online forms or the patient portal, please contact us at 877 899 3349, press 1 or fill out this inquiry form.