Quality Assurance in Medical Website Design

Over the years, quality assurance and quality control have been a challenging endeavor to get just right. With all the changes taking place every day – with search engines, social media, industry specific sites like Realself – and all the new players entering the game – there has just been so much complexity to manage. That complexity produces a lot of need for strong quality assurance.

At the same time, however, the quality of your digital assets is fundamentally important. It tells a story about you and it helps build expectation in the eyes of prospective patients. If that story is one of mistakes, problems, and issues, then you’re likely not going to do well in your chosen endeavor. If, on the other hand, the story is one of sophistication, professionalism, credibility, and expertise, as well as high quality, then you will differentiate yourself from the pack.

While so many different factors have conspired to make quality control difficult, it has not proven impossible to overcome. In fact, nowhere more so than quality assurance does operational execution come into play. If you can outline a series of standard operating procedures, as we have, and execute on those procedures regularly, in a predefined manner, and have the same expected outcome, then you will increase your chances of success.

We have accomplished just that. We now execute based on a series of standards; hundreds across this business. 15 years ago when Robert Baxter first founded Surgeon’s Advisor, we had nothing like this. We were kind of flying by the seat of our pants and just trying to keep up with Google! But so much has changed over time.

Medical Web Marketing Excellence through Operational Execution

These days, especially when speaking at conferences, I like to say that the chief ingredient to success in digital marketing in 2016 in 2017 is the ability to operationally execute across hundreds of different relatively straightforward strategies and concepts. Quality assurance is at the top of this list. Previously, if we built a new contact form for client, we just did that: we built a contact form. Today, building a contact form involves multiple standard operating procedures, each with multiple steps, followed by a quality assurance-specific series of steps designed to validate that it was done properly. The difference is huge! We now know what to expect and that helps us sleep better at night. It also helps our clients sleep better at night.

One of the neatest things we added to our quality assurance strategy is crowd sourced quality assurance. This has helped us tremendously and became part four of our five-part QA strategy. You can only browse a new site so many times before it becomes almost overly-familiar to you. You can only read a page of content so many times before the words start to flow together into one mass and become almost meaningless. But if you distribute the work to multiple people, each bringing their own unique perspective, and importantly each bringing their own device and experience, you uncover so much more. This crowd sourced quality assurance is a huge benefit our already robust quality assurance efforts. Now, however, we have scores of people browsing, testing, and looking for errors and issues, and doing so across a multitude of devices. We may have missed something because we were using, for instance, Safari on a Mac. But not anymore. We are cross-browser and cross-platform testing using smartphones tablets and desktops in a variety of configurations, and all searching for one thing at the end of the day: problems on the site. Because for every problem we catch, we avoid prospective patients catching it for us. We know that your website and each aspect of it is a reflection of you and the work you do and it must be as close to perfect as possible. Your patients expect nothing less.