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Medical Website Design Pro Tips 2024

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Updated January 3, 2024 | 5 min read

This article is the first in a five-part article series on healthcare website development and medical website design.
View Part 2 | View Part 3 | View Part 4 | View Part 5

Clarity HIPAA compliant web development. If you are a healthcare professional or medical provider—i.e., medical doctor, psychiatrist, physical therapist, nurse practitioner, etc.—there are certain things to consider as you design and build your medical website so you can best represent yourself and your practice and provide patients with what they need.

Beyond just design, security is vital, as you must protect your clients' electronic medical and health records (EMR and EHR). Here, we'll give you an overview of best practices for how to build a HIPAA-compliant website for your medical practice.

Key Takeaways

The design of your website should match the feeling you want your medical practice brand to portray.
Make your healthcare website accessible on desktop and mobile devices.
Include patient and doctor portals so patients can access it and doctors can update medical information.
Educational videos are a great way to get your patients engaged and learn important and relevant information.
If your patients speak different languages, opt for a multilingual medical website.
Security is a #1 concern when it comes to healthcare websites, so make sure you follow HIPAA security rules.

Pro Tips for Medical Website Design

As you begin building your medical website, consider your goals for your brand representation and how and why patients will be accessing your site. Here are the important considerations when it comes to a HIPAA-compliant website builder and medical website design.

Create the Right Feel

Creating the right "feeling" is important to medical web design. Depending on your industry or area, you might want to have a clean, modern look that feels more cutting-edge, or have softer colors and rounder fonts for a more inviting and comforting feel. Having the right color scheme for your target audience is important to your brand.

Additionally, you'll want your landing page and social media profiles to reflect your brand and the type of aesthetic you want to portray. High-quality images are also important for maintaining the right impression of your site and medical practice (people will likely see your practice as less professional if your images are low-quality).

Whatever your design, you want to be consistent throughout the site for each type of element and put the patient first by having a user-friendly design.

Make it Accessible

Consider how your patients will access your medical website. Will it be through a mobile device or desktop computer? Would they be more likely to use an app or a web browser? The best healthcare website design is a mobile-friendly medical site that automatically adapts to different devices and screen sizes to allow for easy use.

Mobile applications are becoming increasingly popular, so it's a good idea to develop an app as well as an online website with the help of a HIPAA application developer.

Also, having easy navigation is crucial to both your online website and mobile application. The navigation bar should adapt to the screen size of the device so that it isn't difficult to click or search for things.

Include a Patient Portal

A patient portal is where patients can log in and access scheduling tools and their health information. It's definitely recommended to have a patient portal with your medical website, as patient portals increase patient engagement in their healthcare and have several other benefits.

Having a patient-doctor portal website also increases your chances of turning prospective patients into actual patients, since people are more likely to go to a medical professional that provides a patient portal than to one who doesn't.

Provide Educational Features

Educational articles and videos about various health conditions, medications, medical devices, and more could be beneficial for your patients. You can also provide tutorials on how to use the medical or HIPAA-compliant eCommerce platform, like how to sign up as a new patient, schedule an appointment, and use the chat or messaging system to ask questions.

Enable Multiple Languages

If you have patients that speak different languages, you'll probably need a multilingual website. With a multilingual HIPAA-compliant website, you can let users choose the language they want to be displayed on the site.

Text will be translated and any audio will either be translated (if you have someone to translate) or have subtitle translation. You can have this all be on the same domain or have each language be on its own sub-domain.

Secure Your Website

Of course, the most important factor is how you'll secure your medical site to make sure it stays within HIPAA regulations. The best way is to work with an experienced HIPAA website developer, one familiar with patient portal development. They'll know how best to secure your site and make sure it stays HIPAA compliant.

Medical Websites Are More Than Just Design

HIPAA-compliant websites and patient/doctor portals must be as secure as possible. They must adhere to HIPAA compliance encryption requirements and web hosting as well. Clarity can help you identify the weakest points in your PHI data security.

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Building a HIPAA-Compliant Website

Here's an overview of building a HIPAA-compliant website for your healthcare organization:

Encrypt all data during transmission.
Encrypt all data that are stored or archived.
Only allow authorized personnel to access medical data.
Properly dispose of data when it is no longer needed.

When designing a medical website, your website must be designed around HIPAA standards.

Healthcare Website Development

At Clarity, we’re highly familiar with the unique details that are an integral part of successful healthcare website development, HIPAA hosting, mHealth mobile apps, integrating with EMRs (i.e. EPIC, eClinicalWorks, etc.), and much more. Our past clients include group therapy websites, counselors, and other medical practitioners. Read our other articles for a more granular introduction to HIPAA compliance websites, or contact a Clarity consultant today.

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To learn more about medical website development, check these out:

FAQs

How to create a website for healthcare?

When creating a website for healthcare, you must be sure the website is HIPAA compliant. The steps to creating a website for healthcare are:

Define your goals and target audience.
Choose your platform, domain name, and web hosting.
Plan the website structure.
Choose a Content Management System (CMS).
Create features that meet your needs.
Design and develop the website with accessibility in mind.
Add content, optimizing for conversion rate and search engines. A healthcare integration engine can bring data in from multiple sources.
Test and launch the healthcare website.
Promote your medical website.
Monitor and update the website regularly.

How do I make a good medical website?

To make a good medical website, you should:

Focus on user experience.
Make your site accessible from any device.
Use professional design and branding.
Highlight your expertise.
Include a patient-doctor portal.
Provide useful content.
Make it easy for patients to contact you.
Incorporate patient reviews and testimonials.
Make it HIPAA secure.
Monitor and update the site regularly.

How much does it cost to build a medical website?

The cost of a medical website builder can vary depending on the size and complexity of the site, as well as the design, development, and marketing services required. In general, a small, basic medical website might cost around a few thousand dollars, while a larger, more complex site with custom design and development might cost tens of thousands. An expert at Clarity Ventures can help you get what you need at a reasonable price, so feel free to talk to us.

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