When the hospital is the patient... and the website needs intensive care

If you haven’t recently visited – or read – your hospital’s website, you may want to take a closer look at it. It may be very sick. Any facilitator linking to and promoting hospitals expecting to get help in closing a patient or an employer, needs to take a hard look at these sites.

In building web pages recently for the Top 10 World’s Best Hospitals for Medical Tourists, we took a closer look at their website and discovered that most hospital websites were breaking basic rules.

Information that would be useful to prospective patients or medical travel facilitators is hard to find on the sites. Not one provides much useful or valuable information. Put aside calls for transparency for the moment – none gives basic information about the size of the facility, the number of beds it has or the number of private vs. semi-private rooms, the number of operating theatres, intensive care units, or cardiac care units.

For the most part, all they offer is marketing gobbledygook. Real honest-to-goodness information is barely evident on these websites. Of course, there are plenty of doctor C .V.s and lists of “specialties”. That’s the low-hanging fruit. The sites have plenty of this sort of “stuff”. Finding anything more useful, that makes one hospital stand out from another, is almost impossible. All marketing noise.

Two hospitals of the 10 are different. Bumrungrad International is head and shoulders above the rest and clearly deserved to win an award in 2008 for the best hospital website. Shouldice, as a highly specialized hospital, offers specific information about its speciality and its business.

How do hospitals – and the medical travel agents that reproduce the same marketing noise on their own websites – expect patients to find them? How often do prospective patients conduct a google search for “medical tourism?” “Excellence?” “World class?” “Orthopedics?” “Specialty?” Longer phrases and long tail search keywords and phrases won’t separate you from the rest of the hospitals, if you are offering up the same old marketing silliness as everyone else.

Taking a hard look at these websites, one observes that hospitals in medical destinations are doing a far worse job of marketing themselves than I’d thought. Even the basics of web design are not met. How then can these hospitals expect patients to find them by searching?

A poor website helps no one, not the hospital, not the healthcare consumer, and most certainly not the facilitator.

Hospitals, take your website's temperature. If it's sick, fix it fast. You have no one to blame but yourself if medical tourists go elsewhere for care.

Find out if you are making any of the same basic mistakes that the best hospitals are making.