When a patient visits your hospital’s website for information or to complete a transaction, their experience impacts your brand. But is that impact positive or negative? 

You’ll never know … unless you ask. So, we did.

Our survey of over 165,000 healthcare website visitors provides valuable insights as to what visitors want when they visit your website.

The biggest takeaway: If you don’t give visitors what they want, they’ll leave the site with a new negative impression of your brand. In fact, nine percent (9%) of people said the hospital website they visited created a “new negative” feeling about the hospital brand. That might not seem like a big percentage, but…

0.09 x (the number of annual website visitors) = Houston, we have a problem.

Securing the Authentic Voice of the Patient

Using a proprietary survey tool called gSight, Greystone.Net and Klein & Partners are continually asking website visitors about their site experiences. “Directly asking your customers is the best way to understand what’s important to them,” says Toni Klein, co-founder and digital practice lead at Klein & Partners.

“Surveying your audience helps you understand the mindset of your customer base on their visit to your digital properties. Authentic user feedback helps you identify their pain points and efficiently prioritize web improvements, especially when there are limited resources.”

The Survey says…

Let’s look at some of the biggest pain points from survey responses from Q4 2020 and January 2021:

• 53% reported having trouble requesting medical records
• 51% reported having trouble contacting the hospital with a question or issue
• 44% reported having trouble paying a bill
• 43% reported having trouble with a price check
• 38% had trouble with appointment scheduling

Yikes.

But there’s hope. With the ability to ask about a website visitor’s pain points, you can turn those into actionable steps to improve your hospital’s website.  

For example, based on what people said about choosing a new physician, here’s a quick list of what you can do to make the process easier:

• Improve the filter function to help people select the specialist they need.
• Make it clear which providers accept new patients.
• List the name of insurance companies that providers accept. Filtering physicians by insurance accepted is even better.
• Create online scheduling for providers.
• Simplify the browsing process.

Make It Easy

Hospital website visitors said their #1 priority is to find what they are looking for easily.  In addition, they want fewer clicks to get to their desired content, a better search function and more useful content.

And most important, remember that marketing can drive website traffic. It turns out that “search” drives certain information-seeking behavior. Here’s a look at what visitors were searching for during January 2021:

• 16%: Covid information
• 15%: Information on appointment scheduling
• 13%: Information on a specific health service offered
• 11%: Information on pre-registration.

Want to learn more or schedule a gSight demo? Contact Melinda McDonald at mmcdonald@greystone.net or visit www.gsight.net