For healthcare marketers, a primary concern is marketing your physicians to bring in more patients. The online physician directory is probably the most important tool for this strategy. Are you inadvertently sabotaging your directory?
Let’s look at some areas where organizations may be slipping up with their physician directories.
- Call it what it is. Using a moniker other than “find a doctor” can hamper your efforts. People wanting to find a provider at your organization want to find the physician directory easily. Ideally, the physician directory tool will be included in a prominent location in your primary navigation.
- Don’t make the user work too hard. Requiring the entry of multiple search parameters before showing physicians can be a turn-off for some users. This is an area that should be tested before going live to find the most effective search options for your users.
- Give each physician an individual bio page. People want to know about a physician before scheduling an appointment. There should be an individual page for each physician with a unique URL so that the page can be shared.
- Give adequate information about physicians. Yes, people want to know the educational background of a physician, as well as any certifications and areas of specialty. But you should also include a profile photo, publication history, any videos or other relevant media, as well as patient testimonials. Listing information such as outside interests and activities is a bonus that helps to round out a user’s perception of the physician.
- Fine tune the search filters. Be sure to use terms that people will actually be searching for. A person looking for a physician who treats cancer may or may not know the term “oncologist.” A woman with breast cancer is looking for someone who specializes in breast cancer, so she should be able to get results from the term “breast cancer” in the search field. Refining search teams might benefit from testing.
- Use professional-looking profile photos. Many organizations have guidelines for profile photos, like having all physicians standing in front of a particular backdrop wearing a white lab coat. Regardless of how your organization gets the photos, they should be professional and have a consistent look. And the images should be high resolution.
- Include contact information for various contact points. There should be not only a phone number for a user to call if more information is needed or there are questions, but there should be other contact options as well. Perhaps a person is looking at the profile after normal hours, so would prefer to email rather than call. If you offer an online contact form, make sure that is linked as well.
- Include advanced search options. The more a user can narrow his/her search parameters, the more likely he/she is to get the specific information needed.
Here are a couple of examples of physician directory listings that incorporate “about” and “bio” information on individual provider pages: