A health library has the power to educate patients and show a healthcare organization’s expertise. But accomplishing this takes much more than attaching the library to a website and hoping users find their way to the content.
Forrest Health, which comprises six hospitals in south Mississippi, wasn’t going to leave it to chance. The organization took strategic steps to make the most of its investment in Healthwise, which provides high-quality articles, videos, and interactive health tools to help patients take charge of their well-being.
Customized Linking Strategy
For advice on drawing more website visitors to these content assets, Forrest Health turned to Geonetric. At the client’s request, the agency focused on webpages about heart and vascular care, one of forresthealth.org’s most-viewed service-line content sections. One simple solution? Linking names of conditions and procedures listed in page copy to relevant health library articles. Now, it takes just one click for users to get detailed information—when and where they want it—about their treatment. And because Healthwise regularly updates its content and reviews it with medical professionals, Forrest Health’s marketing staffers can spend less time worrying about staying on top of advances in medicine.
Right Content, Right Time
On other pages about major service lines, SmartPanels—a feature of Geonetric’s VitalSite CMS—dynamically display links to health library articles related to the page topic. This approach lets Forrest Health easily promote Healthwise content, even without taking time to add customized links to each page’s body copy.
Health library content appears in site search results, too. A visitor looking for information about BMI sees the option to use a Healthwise tool to calculate this number. A search for “breast cancer screening” brings up one of the library’s many interactive Decision Point guides that help patients make informed choices about getting certain tests or treatments. This integrated search functionality lets patients stay on Forrest Health’s site instead of turning to Google to hunt for health information.
Prominent Placement
Forrest Health also links directly to the health library from the site’s secondary navigation. That means users are always just a click away from an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge about health and wellness—no matter what page they’re on.