How to fix a website that’s stressing your patients out

Breaking barriers and reducing anxiety

Think back to the last time you engaged with the healthcare system as a patient. What had to happen before you booked your appointment?

Probably some of these things:

• You had to find time. For marketing people on a salary, time is a scarce resource. Imagine how much more challenging it would be if you, like most Americans, were paid hourly. For that person, time off work means lost wages.
• You had to face a childcare decision. You could bring your kids (frowned upon), pay a sitter (difficult on an hourly wage), or lean on a friend or family member (uncomfortable).
• You expected to waste time sitting in the waiting or exam room while the doctor saw other patients.
• You expected to feel rushed by a doctor with too many patients and too little time to have a real conversation.
• You had to find a physician who accepts new patients. If you’re in a rural area, this is extra difficult as there often aren’t enough PCPs to serve your geography.
• Speaking of rural areas, you had to find transportation, which is limited as you get further away from cities. The Brookings Institute recently found that hundreds of thousands of zero-vehicle households live beyond the reach of public transportation. 
• You had to be emotionally ready to deal with a health condition. This is no small matter. Men are notorious procrastinators when it comes to healthcare. Women, especially those with family responsibilities, tend to put their own health at the bottom of long and ever-growing to-do lists.

When you break it down, booking a simple appointment takes a lot of thought and energy. Is it any wonder your website isn’t bringing in more appointment requests?

Marketers must reduce the anxiety for their web visitors

Barriers like those above create what conversion-science nerds (like me 🙂 ) call anxiety. The more anxiety is present at a given conversion point, the less likely a person is to complete the conversion. It’s your job as a hospital marketer to find ways to lower the anxiety. That usually means offering alternatives to the appointment request.

We’ve seen this kind of thing work. In a recent campaign, we found that an interactive quiz gathered 11 times more potential patients than an appointment request. Half of those potential patients requested that the health system calls them as a follow-up. In any other industry, we’d call that a hot lead. And we’d be on the phone with them immediately, offering to help right away, with a smile on our faces.