Hospital websites: Study lists top 25 in the nation

 

U.S. hospital websites have a lot of room for improvement.

That was a key conclusions of a recent study of hospital and health system websites published in the latest edition of the Journal of Healthcare Management.

The study assessed hospital websites in four key criteria: accessibility (ease of use for people with low computers skills), content (freshness, quality and amount of content), marketing (how readily and reliably information can be accessed using search engines), and technology (download speed, site structure, code quality).

In particular, the study said hospital website content frequently isn’t user-friendly for consumers with lower levels of health and computer literacy, makes poor use of graphics and images to supplement text, and could be better optimized for search engine results, which would make it easier for users to quickly find what they’re looking for on the sites.

The main benefit to hospitals of designing a better website is obvious: Better customer service likely leads to more customers. And more consumers are making decisions about which hospital to seek treatment from based on information they gather from competing websites, according to the study.

“If a hospital’s website does not conform to or exceed a customer’s expectations based on  previous experiences [with consumer sites like Amazon and eBay], customers may make inferences about facility quality that may negatively influence their decision-making process,” according to the study.

The good news for hospitals? Improving websites is relatively cheap and easy, and provides instantly visible returns.

Below is a list of the top 25 hospitals in the U.S., according to the study. Note that many in the list had the same overall score, resulting in lots of ties.

When glancing through the top 25, researchers made one interesting observation: A lot tend to be either children’s or specialty hospitals, in particular cancer facilities. Because there are fewer children’s and specialty hospitals, they have to compete across wider geographic areas, researchers theorized, giving them greater incentive to focus on their websites.

For a more detailed explanation of how the study was conducted, read below the list.

1. Arizona Cancer Center
2. Scripps Health
3. Hospital for Special Surgery
4. Charles A. Dean Memorial Hospital and Nursing Home
5. Palo Alto Medical Foundation
6. American Family Children’s Hospital
7. Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center
8. The Children’s Medical Center of Dayton
9. Avera Health
10. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
11. Nationwide Children’s Hospital
12. Sutter Health
13. MD Anderson Children’s Cancer Hospital
14. National Jewish Health
15. The Children’s Hospital, Denver, Colorado
16. PinnacleHealth
17. Mayo Clinic (Note: This graphic designer was not such a big fan of Mayo’s site.)
18. Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh
19. Genesis Hospital
20. Meriter Health System
21. Johns Hopkins Children’s Center
22. SUNY Upstate Medical University
23. University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center
24. Mills-Peninsula Health Services
25. Doernbecher Children’s Hospital at Oregon Health and Sciences University

Here’s how researchers conducted the study: They mapped each health system’s site using a webcrawler, an analysis tool that begins at the top-level web page for the domain of each health system. Then, the analysis tool scored websites based on the four criteria researchers laid out: accessibility, content, marketing and technology.

In total, researchers surveyed 636 hospital websites. Close observers may notice that number is far lower than the number of hospitals in the U.S., which is more than 5,700. One of the study’s authors, Eric Ford, a professor of business administration at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, said much of that is because big health systems have multiple hospital facilities. In Greensboro, for example, one health system website covers five hospitals, Ford said.