Baptist Health’s award-winning website, Baptist-Health.com, has been voted by consumers in the market area as being the hospital website most often used over other hospital websites for the majority of the last decade.
But while traffic to the website has continued to increase, based on consumer experience and feedback there was a need to not settle for past success and create a new website that gives consumers more of what they want and stays ahead of trends in digital usage.
A great website and digital platform is important because they forge individual relationships with the audience. Unlike any other broadcast medium, digital channels allow direct engagement with each member of the audience.
The level of involvement required by consumers to digitally engage with a brand — a click of the mouse, a comment, a video view — shrinks the gulf between interaction and offline brand perception.
A new website design for Baptist Health offered multiple opportunities for enhancing the consumer experience to increase the opportunity to connect with Baptist Health. Research consistently indicates the increased importance and use of digital technology to access healthcare.
Additionally, the growing use of mobile devices has mandated responsive design elements, including navigation and content updates to improve ease of use, and like with everything else, Baptist Health strives to be the market leader in delivering information on its services in all the ways that people are looking for them.
Giving Consumers What They Want Where They Look for It the Most
The website redesign was approached with the consumer in mind. Research helped Baptist Health learn how consumers use the website and how they approach healthcare-related searches.
The top three most-visited areas of the Baptist Health website are the “appointments,” “locations,” and “find a doctor” sections.
Each of these categories has a direct correlation to driving utilization of Baptist Health services, but these sections were some of the most difficult features to use on the old website. Additionally, as with many websites that begin to grow older, years of additions were starting to culminate into a cumbersome set of navigations.
After a lengthy phase of exhaustive reviews and evaluating options for improvement, it was decided that a redesign of the website was necessary to transition to a platform that was open-sourced, responsive, and moved the Baptist Health website experience into a best of class digital experience.
The mission behind the website redesign was to build a strong, comprehensive digital presence that meets consumers’ needs and expectations while at the same time driving awareness of and engagement with the Baptist Health brand.
Simply put, the goal was to create a site that drove more digital appointments and higher engagement with Baptist Health through digital access points.
The website differentiates Baptist Health from competitors by creating a responsive experience that provides access from every device, a streamlined navigation with single action points per task, and enhanced features such as an upgraded video player, forms, drop-downs and interactive content.
Creating the New Website
The project to produce the new website was broken down into four steps that took a scientific approach to finding out how to better serve those seeking out Baptist Health through the Internet.
First, the process began with discovery. Before a direction could be established, an extensive research into users, past website analytics, and future goals was conducted. This information was the most vital to drive decisions for the strategy and design.
For the second phase, competitive research and usability testing was used to determine best practices for the site maps and wireframes, which can be considered as the blueprints for the website.
The third phase, design, involved painting the pixels and telling the stories by applying creativity based on the target to move the users to act.
The final step was development. In this phase, the technical solutions were finalized and the back end was created so the front end could sing!
The entire process from evaluation to design completion took a little more than one year and included involvement from more than 100 people across the Baptist Health system.
The website is made up of more than 2,200 pages that have all been redesigned. The redesigned Baptist-Health.com is a best of class healthcare website from design to security and provides a strategic digital brand platform that will serve the Baptist Health system in a wide variety of ways going into the future.
Highlighting Some Fun Facts About the Revamped Website
- All phone numbers on the website are click-to-call to make it easier for cell phone usage.
- The entire website can be translated into another language with the click of a button.
- Pre-registration for all inpatient services at all hospitals is now possible online.
- There is access to both the hospital and clinic patient portals as well as tutorials for MyChart.
- The updated and enhanced online health library has more and better articles, news stories, quizzes, calculators, and recipes.
- The Plan Your Visit section was created to provide patients and visitors information they would need during their stay –– including dining options, gift shops, and visiting hours as well as insurance and financial information and Pastoral Care services.
- The site is filled with information that encourages consumers to stay healthy on their own (health library, quizzes, healthy recipes, screenings, classes) but assures them we can care for them when they need us.
- KeepOnAmazing.com has been incorporated into the Stay Healthy section.
- More than 1,000 physicians are listed on the website with the ability to enhance their online presence with specific health focuses or clinical interests to help consumers find Baptist Health physicians first when they Google conditions, photos, and videos.
- There are more than 300 videos on the site.
- More than 12 years’ worth of content was completely reorganized with the oversight of Baptist Health program line managers.
- Brand messages seen in other mediums such as TV and print are now incorporated into the respective program lines’ web pages.