In this age of social networking, community is the key word. Business theory today is all about looking at your business as a community of stakeholders including customers, workers, and everyone along your supply chain. If you are a medical practitioner, it’s important to think of you, your staff, and your clients as a complete community. And as a doctor, you are that community’s leader, responsible for its health, happiness, and overall well-being.
In this age of shrinking dollars and heightening costs, you need to maximize the service you provide your community, offering value-laden extras that really aren’t extras at all.
As you design your medical website, it’s important to understand some modern business principles:
- It can cost ten times more to make a sale to a new customer than to make a new sale to an old customer.
- No advertisement is more valuable than word-of-mouth, especially when it is delivered by healthy vibrant patients.
- Spending money offering added value to customers is much more cost-effective than spending money on advertising.
We will be addressing all three of those areas in future blogs. But for now, think of the homepage of your website as your virtual waiting room, a place where patients gather to learn about their health and how they can participate in their own wellness. Ask yourself if it’s truly patient-centric. Does it provide quick access to the information they require without a whole lot of paperwork and waiting? Do they know where they can go to get their questions answered? Does it provide testimonials about the quality and depth of your services? Is it stagnant or does it provide something of unique interest each time they come back?
And perhaps most importantly is it a place where sick people gather or is it a place where health-minded people learn new ways to maintain vibrant healthy lifestyles? For every disease in the world, there’s a dozen message boards where people can lament about their illness. You don’t need to provide that sort of forum. Instead build a positive-minded community where anything and everything is possible. You need not be dishonest about an outlook but you need to provide the best possible perspective.
People hate paying their doctors to fix what’s broken, but they will gladly pay the going rate to drink from the fountain of youth. When at all possible, don’t send them elsewhere for that drink. Instead think about what services you are providing or could be providing that will make them feel younger and healthier. At least two out of every three want to lose weight, Nearly everyone that smokes wants to find a way to stop smoking. And anyone who suffers chronic pain wants to find a way to stop that pain. You should be providing services for all these concerns and if not, at the very least be offering good advice that will encourage people to be proactive in matters of their health.
As you design your medical website, always be thinking of ways of building a community of healthy wellness-minded people and the various ways they can participate in improving their lives.
