The healthcare guide: commissioning a website patients can lean on
Your visitors are not browsing
They are worried about a symptom at two in the morning, holding a phone in one hand and a child in the other, or checking whether a referral has sent their parent somewhere trustworthy. Most healthcare websites are built like corporate brochures for a calm reader who does not exist. This guide is about commissioning one for the visitors who do.
What the site has to do
Three jobs, in order. It has to be calm and fast, because an anxious visitor on a phone abandons a slow page in seconds and remembers the frustration longer than you would like. It has to be accurate and current, because in this sector a stale page about services, clinicians or opening hours is not an oversight, it is a clinical communication failure. And it has to work for everyone, which means real accessibility, tested rather than claimed, because the people who most need your information are disproportionately the people accessibility failures lock out.
What to put in the brief
Name the three or four journeys that matter and insist the site is designed around them: book or enquire, find a clinician, get information before an appointment, refer a patient. State your regulatory context up front, whether that is CQC, NHS supply chains or professional body rules, so nothing has to be retrofitted. Decide who clinically signs off content and how often it is reviewed, because the answer needs to survive contact with busy diaries. And gather your existing patient information leaflets, because they are content the project does not have to fund.
What to measure
Appointment requests and referral enquiries, not visits. Task completion on the journeys above, which a short round of testing with real patients will measure better than any dashboard. And the searches bringing people to you, because they show what your community is actually worried about, which is clinical intelligence as much as marketing data.