Dr. John D. Halamka is chief information officer and dean for technology at Harvard Medical School who writes at Life as a Healthcare CIO.
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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.
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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 high 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.
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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.
Dr. John D. Halamka is chief information officer and dean for technology at Harvard Medical School who writes at Life as a Healthcare CIO.
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