Why Every Private Medical Practice Should Have a Website (part 1 of 3)

Five years ago, if you asked me if a website was mandatory for physicians, I would have said “no”. But times have changed. Now, I believe every doctor should have a website.

Here’s why:Websites play several very important roles in your practice. At the most mundane end of the spectrum, a website provides patients or potential patients with your critical contact information, hours, directions, maps, etc. This is convenient for the patient, and helps reduce the number of repetitive calls that come in to your front desk or receptionist.

More importantly, a website can help offload many of the common tasks that your staff performs as it pertains to answering patient questions, providing routine instructions, etc. Any repetitive task that involves conveying information from you or your staff, to your patient, is an appropriate task that can be “offloaded” to your website. In addition, any literature that you have in your offices that is helpful and informative to your patients should be uploaded to the website, which provides greater convenience for the patient. Respect for your patient’s time is the unspoken message, and patients do respond to that. A very full-featured website can even help you eliminate staff, reducing expenses considerably.

But the single most important role of a website (and the primary reason that you need a website NOW) is for marketing purposes. As you have probably noticed, when the economy tightens, people reduce their visits to doctors at all ends of the spectrum, from basic preventative care to high end cosmetic procedures. Years ago, having a medical license and an office space was sufficient to build a thriving practice.

With constantly decreasing reimbursements and increased focus on efficiency and results, doctors must act much more like other types of business owners. They have to do what they can to earn “market share”. You can no longer take your revenue for granted, and you should look for ways to reduce costs as well as bring in larger streams of revenue. Therefore, bringing in new customers (patients) is one of the primary roles of physicians who want thriving medical practices.

A website can be the single most effective tool to bring in new patients, and done properly, it can also be the single most cost-effective method as well. If you had the opportunity to have a face to face consultation with every prospective new patient, you would probably “close” a high percentage of those and convert them into new patients. But your time is limited and very valuable, so this obviously is not possible.

But you can accomplish the next best thing by using your website as a communications tool.
As a communications and marketing tool, a website can help your prospective patients learn everything about you and your services that you would normally convey during a face to face consultation. But with video on your website, you can do this with greater and greater numbers of prospective patients without cutting into your time available for actual patients.

The use of video in particular is an excellent way to reach out to your current and prospective patients, to bring them news, information, and advice. Anything that you could say to a group of people, you can say using video on your website.

These are all excellent reasons for you to create a website for your practice. And fortunately you don’t have to know a thing about internet technology to get a high quality website and an internet presence. You just need to be able to identify the features you want in a website, and outsource the creation of the site to a qualified professional. Your patients will thank you for making your practice and information more convenient, and you will love to see your practice grow as a result!

Ryan Harris
Marketing Professional
Clear Path Marketing
San Diego, CA