With hospital websites all looking mostly the same, is it time to think differently?
Healthcare websites seem to have reached a design consensus.
Whether it’s a health system in Virginia or California, hospital sites tend to look mostly the same. This isn’t a criticism, since we design a lot of healthcare websites. It’s more a curious observation, and the invitation for a discussion about what might be next in healthcare website design.
Just to be clear what we’re talking about, we asked the AI tool Claude to create a mockup of a home page of a website of a regional healthcare system that offers both specialty care and primary care. (See the whole mockup.)
Then we asked Claude to mockup the home page of an academic medical center that has some U.S. News & World Report rankings. (See the whole mockup.)
Finally, we asked Cladue to write and design a health condition page. It picked diabetes. (See the whole mockup.)
Obviously, these mockups are rough. But with a bit of professionalizing and compelling photography, they could be any hospital site. You only need one glance to know exactly what you’re looking at. The overall words. Where things are on the page.
Is this good? Is this bad? In our view, it’s neither. It’s just what is, and the industry is hoping it continues to work.
Not that anyone in the industry, even the top hospital brands, particularly knows how well their websites truly work.
How Did We Get Here?
Where we are now—a site that navigates smoothly on mobile, is easy to search and use for basic tasks, and doesn’t leave people immediately frustrated—is certainly better than where we were a decade ago with hospital website design.
With research and thoughtful UX strategy, we’ve created a thing that works far better than previous iterations. A hospital website that follows best practices will make countless customers’ lives easier. We believe this to our core.
And yet, we’re in a situation where the highest aspiration is to look and sound like everyone else.
There are a few reasons why this is true.
First, health systems default to a safe approach in nearly everything they do. They’ll spend money to upgrade their digital platform, but it feels far too risky to step outside of what the industry seems to have now agreed is expected.
Also this: it’s difficult to measure ROI from a website. No health system is ever quite sure how well their site is working. There’s no good way (yet) to build a data-driven business case around doing something entirely different.
Breaking away from the pack is too scary. We get it. We would never say to one of our clients, “Let’s do something completely wacky just to try it!”
The conundrum is that the way consumers find and use healthcare websites is rapidly changing.
Take that Find-a-Doc tool you invested in that everyone else has. Are your customers actually using it? Or are they relying on social proof, reviews, referrals, and recommendations? Do you merely have the tool because everyone else does?
And then there’s your health-related content. All those condition pages. You’re in the business of health, so it’s important to talk about what you treat and how you do it. Except . . . with the rise of AI Overviews, organic click throughs may be down by as much as 70%. As of June 2024, 63% of healthcare queries returned an AI Overview, with NIH.gov and Mayoclinic.org being the top 2 citations in healthcare-related AI Overview results.
The behavior that we’ve been describing for the past several years—people finding answers to their health queries via Google and using a health system website mostly for transactional functions—is now exponentially more disruptive.
This is all to say: what if the relatively flat experience of a website can’t match the dynamic experience of technology changing by the minute?
What if we’re about to enter the age of the great unraveling, when the digital behavior of your customers is less and less related to that streamlined website you built that fits perfectly on the shelf with every other website?
Three Questions To Ask Now
Acknowledging that big change is ahead doesn’t mean it’s time to throw away everything we know about good design and good content for hospital sites.
But it does mean that it’s a great time to start having conversations and asking the big questions.
At some point just a few decades ago, somebody probably said: What would happen if people just had easy access to their electronic medical record? (We remind you that 30 years ago, this idea was so preposterous it was the basis for a Seinfeld episode, with Elaine going to great lengths to try to steal her medical chart.)
What are the big questions to ask now? We have three suggestions.
- What if people aren’t coming to your health system website for the reasons you think? Despite how we design sites to accommodate for it, users don’t generally start their searches for care or providers on your site. They nearly always start somewhere else on the web. What if you scrapped most of what you think you know about how people use your site, and started with a whole new set of assumptions? Have you revisited your assumptions in the last 5 years?
- What would it look like to build for cross-platform experiences? Think about the most important tasks people do on your website, and ask yourself if it’s possible for them to do those tasks without navigating through your site. Consider that people can look at a restaurant’s menu, read reviews, see pictures of the food, learn the restaurant’s hours and make a reservation . . . all without touching the restaurant’s actual website. Is that even possible for your health system, and if so, what does your wildest imagination conjure up?
- How does your site need to evolve with AI? You won’t outcompete AI in the race to deliver health content quickly, but you can present valuable content that helps your website visitors make decisions and ultimately transact with your site. Once users are on your site, what content do they need to see? How can your site’s content deliver something beyond what shows up in AI-generated search content?
