Increase the effectiveness of both the individual practices and the group as a whole
Large medical groups are on the rise. According to a recent study, between the years 2005 and 2013 an estimated 71,000 physicians left their private practice for hospitals.
In addition to lower overhead and a move toward consolidation in health care, hospitals and large medical groups have many advantages over smaller practices with respect to marketing — excellent visibility, association with notable organizations, and, in the case of hospitals, a low amount of local competition. However there are many challenges for the smaller clinics that practice out of these organizations. Often their unique page is buried within the website. These pages will often have less content that can be indexed by search engines (Learn more about search engine optimization here).
Does Your Large Medical Group Need Marketing?
For administrators of hospitals and large medical groups, here are some questions you will want to be able to accurately answer:
- Do the individual practices have their own brand?
- Do you track the web traffic that each individual practice receives?
- Do you effectively promote ancillary services?
- Do you track lead conversions by practice, or at all?
If your answer to any of the above questions is ‘No’, you may want to take a look at the overall marketing plan, of which digital marketing should be a large part. Ultimately, the question you need to ask yourself is: does your marketing plan focus solely on the hospital or medical group brand? More often than not, the needs of the group are focused upon at the expense of the individual practices, leading to uneven distribution of clients, frustration, and possible separation.
Medical Websites: More Important than Ever
Here are some eye-popping statistics for anyone administering a large medical practice:
- Roughly 80% of all prospective patients research their doctor online before making a decision on which healthcare provider to visit
- Close to 50% of all web traffic happens from a mobile phone or a tablet
- Large organizations tend to keep websites past their “shelf life;” more troubling: the older a site’s architecture is, the more problematic it can be to rank pages in the top search results
Medical group and hospital administrators must also take into account multiple departments — billing, patient advocacy, human resources, third party vendors, and much more.
It’s imperative that a website can contribute in making all areas of administration, promotion, and ultimate user satisfaction. The content on the site should be direct, informative, and useful; the navigation should be easy whether you’re at your computer or on your smartphone, and each of your individual practice pages should rank well for their respective services in search engines like Google.
Best Practices
At Surgeon’s Advisor, we’ve taken our 15 years of experience in medical marketing to the next step, by working closely with hospitals, leading them to online best practices. Part technical, part data-driven, and part marketing savvy, we have helped hospitals not only track the online health of their site’s overall efficiency, but that of their individual practices as well, with an effective balance on both the macro and the micro.
These best practices include:
- Site Analysis and Coding Maintenance
- Lead Generation Design
- Up-to-date Coding
- Site Organization & Architecture
- User Friendliness
- Mobile Friendliness
- Content Creation
- Lead Tracking
Interested in learning more about how we can help your hospital or large medical association get better results, both as a group and as individuals? Contact us today!