I believe in Information Therapy and a Medical Website is a very powerful tool to facilitate it. But to effectively impart information therapy, requires more than putting up 5 pages of text with some fancy images. Its important to use medical web experts to help create a site which is visually appealing, medically correct and patient friendly. I see tons of bad sites, and to be frank a few years back my own firm provided what I regard as medical websites which were not up to the mark to a couple of its clients. Thankfully, these sites were upgraded for free when our team learnt all about "What makes a Good Medical Website".
Here is a 7 step rule which serves as the basic rule set of a Good Medical Website.
1. Ensure Simple Navigation. Follow Jakob Nielsen's rules.
2. Make text readable; on different devices.
3. Use Images and Audio Visual Aids to communicate and explain Diseases and Conditions
4. Provide contact forms and let patients and peers email you.
5. Keep the content fresh and updated.
6. Ensure that every paper one may have to read or fill in when visiting your practice is available for download and easy to locate in either a Doc or a PDF format on the website
7. Provide visitors/patients with easy to use tools such as medical calculators. Let patients have the option of sharing the results displayed by these calculators with you directly via the website.
