5 Main Challenges of Developing a Medical Website

There are a few things more important to a company in the medical industry than their reputation.

When you provide products and services that directly affect the lives of individuals, trustworthiness is key. Being trustworthy as a company comes in a different number of ways. Corporate responsibility, open communication, and, of course – an image that reflects those values.

These days, any company’s website is their most visible representation of their image. There are unique challenges to successfully crafting a medical website that helps preserve your positive reputation. We’ll be covering the five most common – and what to do about them – in today’s post.

Maintaining HIPAA compliance

HIPAA is an acronym that represents the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. This act, passed back in 1996, works to reduce health care fraud by maintaining industry-wide standards for healthcare billing and patient info. Not all medical websites will need to follow HIPAA guidelines, but if your website stores or transmits any type of protected health information, it will.  Making your website HIPAA compliant will require dedication to encryption for all information that is stored or communicated. Even if you’re not asking patients to enter sensitive data on the website, they might include health information while contacting you through a general contact form, so you’ll want HIPAA compliance in place.

Keeping speeds fast while maintaining mobile-friendliness

Most web searches happen on mobile phones. You can put a considerable amount of effort into having a page with quality content and a unique design… but if it doesn’t load, no one will have the chance to see it. This is especially true on mobile phones where our page-loading-patience tends to be shorter. To best compete, medical companies have to make sure they have the right web hosting and server support to be easily accessed – anywhere, anytime.

Consistently producing accurate, value-added content

When it comes to content creation, most companies rely on their in-house industry experts to draft the blog and social posts they share. The medical industry has slightly more trouble with this because their experts – doctors and engineers – don’t typically have the bandwidth to handle content creation. Most successful medical company websites are successful because they’ve found a trusted agency to produce content in line with their company’s subject matter expertise that they can easily review and post.

Visually standing out among competitors

A large majority of medical websites use similar color schemes. Typically, they include shades of white and blue. These colors evoke feelings of cleanliness, calm, and trust and have been associated with the medical field for a long time. There’s nothing wrong with these color choices, but it’s important to make sure that your medical web page design stands out in different ways. This can be through clever design layouts, photography, or other unique-to-your-business features that set you apart.

Making sure data protection efforts meet the highest standards

Security is always at the forefront of modern website development. This is especially true for medical companies. Depending on the industry niche your business serves, you could easily be managing important private information like payment info or medical records. The best way to protect this information is by making sure your website uses SSL. SSL, also known as Secure Sockets Layer, is a safety protocol you can add to your website to make sure all interactions within are safely encrypted. As an added bonus, Google gives an extra ranking boost to sites that can prove they’re using SSL.

While these challenges exist, they’re all easy to overcome. If you’d like some assistance during the process, give the team at Windmill Strategy a call. We’ve been helping medical companies like yours develop websites and marketing plans for years – and we’ve got the expertise to show it.

If you’d like more immediately helpful information, we recommend reading our blog on How to Share Essential COVID-19 Communications with B2B Customers.