Without a website, you may be the invisible doctor

If you are working to build your practice, a practice Web site can be an excellent, and possibly indispensable, marketing tool. Even if you just put up information about your office hours and your specialties.

Medical Economics has published a number of stories on the topic. In one of them, My website transformed my practice, the author, Washing DC-based physician Howard Stark, MD, tells of how he lets his patients make and reschedule appointments.

More than 95 percent of my patients are using the website. It’s an astonishing number, but perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised. My small practice of roughly 550 patients consists mostly of business executives, US governmental officials, and foreign ambassadors and military officers, who are invariably computer literate. They travel all over the world, but want me to care for them regardless of location. The website makes that easier.

“Once they see the site, they don’t even want to call me anymore,” says my grinning assistant. Who can blame them? My website is available 24/7 and using it is faster than making a telephone call.

Of course, not all doctors are comfortable giving this level of scheduling control to their patients, such as FP Kulendu Vasavda, who does maintain a website, but prefers human interaction for making appointments. As he says in a article appearing yesterday, As more patients turn to the Web every day, are doctors prepared for the influx?, in the Stockton Record:

“I could allow patients to schedule their own appointments, but I think medicine needs to be a more hands-on process. We don’t want them to triage their own problems; we want to determine when they need to come in, whether it’s in the next 24 hours or they can wait two weeks. The human aspect still needs to be determined over the phone,” Vasavda said.

Other practices offer online libraries of patient education materials and personal health tools, such as those covered in another Medical Economics article, Time to update your website?

Whatever you do, however, having some sort of a Web site is almost a given for many patients. To them, if they can’t find you online, you don’t exist.

Bookmark to:

From Medical Economics magazine, more on Web services ...

Permalink