Healthcare Websites: Balancing Beauty, Technology and Function
Between presentations and researching EHR capabilities, I've been pretty "heads down" over the last six weeks. Will thus share a montage of news and research I've encountered recently.
Last month's HIMSS Southwest Regional conference was heavily attended by vendors and consultants. There was good representation from a small number of hospitals, but very few participants (physicians or staff) from the ambulatory world. A poll of my "Lean and Meaningful Workflow Redesign" audience indicated that it was mostly composed of vendors, consultants and internal QA professionals. As a result, I shifted the flow of my introductory presentation to take a deeper dive into managing the workflow redesign process, integrating the work into an EHR and IT deployments, measuring results, and sustaining a culture of continuous improvement. The complimentary letters I received from the HIMSS organizers and participants are greatly appreciated. Next week, I'll be presenting the same topic from a totally different perspective for AHIMA's Texas State conference in San Marcos.
Do you have a health services website that you believe can stack up against the best in the industry? If so, you have until June 30th to enter your site for the 2010 eHealthcare Leadership Awards. This leading awards program, presented by eHealthcare Strategy & Trends, recognizes the very best Web sites of healthcare organizations, online health companies, pharmaceutical and medical equipment firms, business improvement initiatives, and supplier Web sites. Winners will be honored this fall during the Fourteenth Annual Healthcare Internet Conference in Las Vegas. I am one of several judges who will be evaluating websites for this competition.
Health technology writer, Shawn Riley (aka @Rilescat) gets my Twitter "Follow Friday" vote for his coverage of current happenings in the health information technology space. I like his website, HealthTechnica, though I must issue an advisory that the flashing and spinning components could induce seizures in those susceptible.
I'd love to share more, but I recently learned the Captcha anti-spam component of my Drupal website is doing such an effective job at blocking spam that it is keeping bonafide users like you from contacting me as well. The community of Drupalistas I hang out with on Thursday evenings unanimously recommended replacing the Captcha module with Mollom, so that is what I am about to do. While I'm on the subject of websites and Drupal, I should tell you that I manage my own website to build and maintain proficiency in site-building tools. In professional engagements with clients, I work with teams of specialists (graphics designers, code developers, integrators, security specialists, localization specialists and others) to create sites of the professional caliber you will find at Scott & White and sites I'll be judging for eHealthcare over the next few months.
As you may have guessed from my earlier comment about HealthTechnica, I am biased toward websites that support business/service objectives over extreme graphics/effects prowess. I've seen some gorgeous sites that failed to serve the objectives of the visitor and the business. My personal preferences are not quite as austere as those of Jakob Nielsen and Tim Ash, but personal preferences are irrelevent compared to what your web analytics tools, sales, member support, and CPA/CFO should be telling you about how well your site is supporting your mission. Beauty, technology and function are neither mutually exclusive nor necessarily additive. Finding the right balance is one of the things I enjoy most about the work I do.
