Everybody’s Doin’ It

Or almost everybody. Overhauling their website, that is.

Yep, virtual cranes are dotting the Internet landscape these days. In our recent research with healthcare organizations about their digital efforts, nearly a quarter completed an online overhaul in 2013 (24%) with more than twice that number either in the process of redesigning or in the planning stages (41% and 19%, respectively).

That’s a lot of construction activity. More importantly, however, is what do health systems hope to accomplish in their redesigns and why are so many of them doing this now?

If Not Now, When?

Healthcare has been in an interesting economic cycle for the past several years and the next few years promise to continue the uncertainty. The result is more than a few hospitals have held off on updating Web designs that were getting obsolete. Some of those organizations look forward and see they’re not likely to have a better time than now to bite the bullet.

It’s also true that the binge of acquisitions and mergers have created a lot of health systems with a new story to tell and there’s no way to hide these refined brands online. I’ve long said that the website is the place where we rip off the Band-Aids and are faced with all of the messiness in our increasingly complex organizations.

I don’t think either of those reasons is really what’s driving the level of Web redesign activity out there. I think the answer is mobile.

According to Stat, Geonetric’s data warehouse tracking analytics for more than 50 U.S. health systems, mobile traffic accounted for nearly 1/3 of site visits to health system websites in January 2014 with individual organizations seeing 50% or more of their visits coming from phones and tablets.

Twenty six percent of survey respondents had a responsive designed website at the end of 2013 and another 42% are planning to add this preferred method of addressing mobile audiences in 2014. Do those numbers look familiar? They’re almost exactly the same as the respondents having recently overhauled and in the process of doing so as we speak!