"Must Have" Features of a Children's Hospital Website

When you need a hospital, marketing is often separate from the conversation. We make our choice based on the simple matters of convenience and location.

For children’s hospitals, however, there are different dynamics at play. Suppose you’re a parent with a child who’s received a difficult diagnosis. In that case, your concern is no longer one of convenience but of specialty — you need a hospital that knows your child’s unique diagnosis and can provide quality care around that diagnosis.

This means that, in addition to all the usual functions of a hospital website, a children’s hospital website also needs to help educate and reassure parents are making what may be one of the most challenging decisions of their lives.

Understanding audiences.

The primary audience of a children’s hospital website is parents of children who need advanced medical services. But, a children’s hospital website goes beyond this to also include:

• Existing patients and their parent/guardians, who need clear and concise logistical information
• Researchers who align with the hospital’s specialties and can help improve treatment and outcomes through new science
• Donors, without whom none of the above would be possible

All of these groups are interconnected, and each feeds into the success of the other. This is what Jim Collins refers to as the “Flywheel Effect,” where success drives success. For a children’s hospital (or any specialty hospital), this concept might break down something like this: 

• Donors provide essential funding that allows for groundbreaking research, which will bring:
• Doctors and researchers who make progress that improves outcomes for our patients, which will deliver:
• Improved outcomes for our patients that allow us to tell the world of our success, which means we’ll:
• Attract more patients who need help and more donors who want to back a winning team, which means more funding, and the flywheel will keep spinning.

Let’s examine how your website can contribute to driving this flywheel.

Nail the fundamentals.

While driving right into messaging is tempting, we should focus on the fundamentals first. This can include:

• Clear and organized navigation. Ensure your information architecture aligns with your target audiences’ thinking. Warning: this may not necessarily match how your organization is structured. Information research tasks like focus groups, card sorts, and navigation tests can help confirm that your navigation makes the most sense to the broadest audience.
• Prioritize an excellent search experience. Regardless of how good navigation is, users will resort to searching for all but a few top-level tasks. Make sure your search tool returns excellent results for the top tasks across your site based on user behavior analytics.
• Focus on good “logistics”. In trying to attract a larger audience, it’s easy to overlook basic logistical information like physician directories, locations, symptoms and conditions, and other features that support existing patients and staff. But in addition to being critical to the patient experience, these features also demonstrate to visitors what their experience will be like. An excellent physician profile can also show potential staff how someone will handle their information when it comes time to join the team.

Either deal with compliance once or deal with it all the time.

While marketers in other industries have become accustomed to a plethora of free user behavior-tracking tools and data-gathering utilities, many of these tools can be considered HIPAA violations even in anonymous contexts. 

In the 2010s, too many analytics strategies boiled down to “Throw Google Analytics on there and ask questions about the data as you think of them.” A more structured approach tends to deliver both better insight into user behavior and better privacy for users.

Focusing on how user behavior will be measured and used, along with other compliance and performance axes like accessibility, language, speed, and mobile usage during a redesign, can ensure that handling these concerns is automatic, leaving you to focus on the message instead.

Everything communicates the experience.

One of the biggest goals of your web content is to communicate the experience of interacting with the hospital, whether that’s as a patient, parent, employee, donor, staff, or researcher. These facets also interact; doctors want to work in an environment where patients are well cared for, and parents understand clearly, reducing friction. Donors want to invest in a system that reflects positively on them. 

This is reflected in the infrastructure in addition to the content. Well-maintained content organized in clear and obvious navigation reflects a level of care and competency. Similarly, broken systems and accessibility issues online communicate the same things in person that a broken sign and a set of stairs with no ramp at the main entrance would communicate.

Celebrate success.

Everyone hopes, prays, and works for good outcomes in children’s medicine. It’s important to spread the good news about success and progress. 

The most direct way to do this is through patient case studies and testimonials, but working within the organization to develop ways to drive content from all of your departments can give your marketing team many options for demonstrating the organization’s commitment to progress and innovation. 

By developing a process to work with your subject matter experts, you can translate even technical research and process changes to demonstrate your innovation efforts to a broader audience. As a layman, a journal article like “Thrombotic Microangiopathy Following Onasemnogene Abeparvovec for Spinal Muscular Atrophy: A Case Series” doesn’t mean much to me, but publishing that journal article can be an opportunity to explain that techniques are being developed to make one of the standard drug treatments for spinal muscular atrophy safer by identifying adverse side effects in small blood vessels earlier. 

Even more than other medical institutions, the story of a children’s hospital is about emotion. For so many parents, those initial emotions are fear and uncertainty. The mission of the hospital is to care for children and their parents. By building those ideals into a hospital’s online presence, we can extend that mission of care to people before they even enter the front door.