Over the past two years, I've witnessed a transition in modern website design from plain text and static information to multimedia centric and interactive. I've written about the new BIDMC website we implemented to meet patient expectations for a modern website.
Many healthcare organizations I work with are considering content managed, new media, highly interactive web 2.0 sites. I thought it would be useful to describe how we approached the BIDMC website so you can leverage our experience.
Content Management - BIDMC has a great deal of .NET expertise, so we wanted a content management system that worked well in our .NET/SQL Server 2008 environment. SiteCore has been ideal for us, providing content templates, distributed content management, and publishing workflow in a load balanced, secure, virtualized environment. At HMS we use Drupal and Wordpress for content management. They also work well for hosting institutional web sites.
Interactive features - The Corporate Communications folks at BIDMC really wanted to highly interactivity. We built and bought the components they needed as follows
Blogs - Uses a SiteCore provided blogging module
Chat - a commercial application called Cute Chat from CuteSoft.
BIDMC TV (news and information videos produced by BIDMC)- Hosted by BrightCove.
Medical Edge (videos about innovation produced by BIDMC)- Hosted by BrightCove.
Podcast Gallery - Hosted on BIDMC servers.
Health Quizzes - created using a commercial application called SelectSurvey.NET from ClassApps.
Social Networking - entirely hosted by outside service providers (Facebook/Twitter/You Tube).
Secure patient web pages for communication with their families - a commercial application provided by CarePages.
Conditions A-Z - a web-based encyclopedia branded for BIDMC using commercial reference provided by Ebsco.
Search Engine - We're using a Google Appliance
Thus, the combination of SiteCore plus purchased interactive applications and externally hosted streaming video has worked very well to provide our patients with an information rich, interactive experience.
I hope this is useful to you as you implement your own hospital websites.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Implementing a Modern Hospital Website
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