Payments > Patient Billing

Does Patients use Patient Portal?

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shanbull:
I would like to make a case for a fancy website, if I may. Unique practices offering hard-to-find services (like expensive laser machines and homeopathic medicine alongside traditional western medicine) tend to get a lot more patients who find them via website than your average medical practice. We're spending top dollar to develop our new website with HTML5 coding, hiring a photographer to take professional pictures, and really spending the time on each step to consult with our web designer and marketing team because we know some of our services will benefit from better exposure than they have now on our current website that has not been updated since 2007. We are expanding to have a social media presence on Twitter, Facebook, etc. etc. and for some reason I am the only person here with any experience in web design or social media, so guess who gets to run the whole operation and add content? Yours truly :o  We will also be producing videos and blog posts from our doctors in highly specialized fields. This entire week alone I have only been working on color palette ideas for the site.

We're not doing this because we think it's going to help. We know it's going to help to have an updated branding scheme and web search optimization, and we're putting in all this effort now to get the newest and shiniest so the website will not be outdated for another 10 years. We have also added 4 new locations to our original site this year alone, and doubled the amount of providers and specialties under our roof. Many of these new locations were already operating under a different practice, and we need to make sure we have a unified umbrella that patients understand. If you are able to make the commitment to update content regularly and you need to convey a lot of diverse information for many different types of patients, there is a place for a very well-designed website with the bells and whistles. It's first or most important part of advertising and patient recruitment, nor will a website alone do the work that our doctors have over the past 10 years building up this clinic. But there is a place for it.

Another issue to think about; our clinic owner originally paid some freelance guy in India a fraction of what web designers here charge, and the monstrosity that resulted from this shows that you get what you pay for. We have had to completely scrub that design because it has so many functional problems that it was unusable for our purposes. Lesson learned. Do not go for the cheapest option. It doesn't mean you HAVE to shell out $3,000 for a nice website either. Just make sure you are getting exactly what you need from the get-go, and if you're not familiar with website design, make sure you bring along someone who does know what is going on to any consultation. Otherwise, you might be paying a lot of money for garbage.

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