More than 10.6 million Australians now use the internet. Google, a web search engine, has indexed more than 2.5 billion web pages. Is it time to throw your practice into the maelstrom? What content should a practice web site contain? Can it make life easier? How do you go about it?

Basic content
Primarily, a practice website will provide your current and prospective patients with timely information about the services you offer. This would include the information currently in your practice brochure.

Where are you? Who works there? When and how do I contact you? When are you open? Do I need an appointment? Where can I park? What are the arrangements for after hours and emergencies?

Your site can also promote what is special about your practice to prospective patients. What services do you offer? What special interests and qualifications do you have? Have you been accredited?

There is also some specific information you are required to make available as part of accreditation and the privacy act, and a website is an appropriate place to do that.

What is your privacy policy and complaints procedure?

Interesting stuff
My room has so many patient education handouts in various drawers that none of them ever get handed out. I also find myself repeating information and instructions and redrawing diagrams. It would be very useful to direct a patient to our site, where the handouts and instructions are available.

Increasingly, our patients are using the web to find out about their health concerns. This is quite appropriate, as for some conditions, there are tremendous resources available online. For others, there is a tremendous amount of drivel. Search for ‘vaccination’ in Google, for example, and you get our anti-immunisation friends.

As doctors, we have particular expertise in evaluating and filtering information, which is one of the reasons our patients come to see us. It would also be beneficial for our patients to use our websites as their first port of call when seeking medical information online. As well as the articles and resources we have placed on the site, we could include links to reliable sites and perhaps a medical search engine.

Your site might also include news articles that may be of interest to your patients (“Its going to be a bad flu this year”, say experts). Patients could register online to receive the latest articles regularly in an automatically generated newsletter by email.

Through these measures a website can be an excellent opportunity for health promotion and education and for maintaining your relationship with your patients.

Future stuff
It is possible now to have systems that enable patients to make their own appointments online, store their medical information and to look up their own pathology results. (cf Dr Global).

The practical, privacy, security and medico-legal issues regarding this within a practice would still be problematical.

Usability
Your practice website should adhere to usability guidelines. It should be clear who it is aimed at, and should be goal-orientated and fast loading.

There is no point in having a flashy animation and a classical soundtrack when people arrive - they have already found your site, they are there for a purpose, and it should be clear from your home page how to find the information they are looking for. You’ve got 30 seconds, or they will paddle off and not come back.

How do you get a site?
You can build a website yourself using a number of applications that are available online or from a store. ‘Dreamweaver’ (www.macromedia.com) is the most highly regarded of these. Your ISP will normally ‘host’ the site for no extra charge.

Be wary of enthusiastically creating a site, and then due to time constraints losing interest and not keeping it up to date. This may be worse than not having a site at all.

Some companies specialise in creating and hosting sites for medical practices. www.mydr.com.au is part of MIMS and creates pages for practices within their larger health portal.

I have to declare a business interest in LemLink, which creates fully customisable practice websites that allow practices to share handouts, links, articles and medical news and which requires no special software or expertise to maintain. Email me if you’d like a test drive: tlembke@medicineau.net.au

References
http://www.nua.com/surveys/how_many_online/asia.html
http://www.google.com
http://www.drglobal.com
http://www.mydr.com.au
http://www.lemlink.com.au