Integrated Patient Education on U.S. Hospital Web Sites

Edgar Huang,Kelsey Edwards,Kerong Wu

doi:10.15761/hpc.1000131

Abstract

Based on a census of the 2015 Most Wired Hospitals, this content analysis aimed to find out how patient education has been integrated on these best IT hospitals' Web sites to serve the purposes of marketing and meeting online visitors' needs. This study will help hospitals to understand where the weaknesses are in their interactive patient education implementation and come up with a smart integration strategy. The study found that 70% of these hospitals had adopted interactive patient education contents, 76.6% of such contents were from a third-party developer, and only 20% of the hospitals linked their patient education contents to one or more of the hospital's resources while 26% cross-references such contents. The authors concluded that more hospitals should take advantage of modern information communication technology to cross-reference their patient education contents and to integrate such contents into their overall online marketing strategy to benefit patients and themselves.

Highlights

Investing in IT serves as a hospital’s commitment to all parties in healthcare, including patients [1]
How consistent are hospitals in naming patient education contents so that patients can identify and find such contents?. Out of these 326 Most Wired Hospitals in 2015, 70% carried interactive patient education contents clearly listed under a menu name or immediately featured on the home page; 2% carried no textbased patient education contents listed under a menu name but showed patient education videos or interactive tools only
The 70% adoption rate for adopting interactive patient education contents among the 2015 Most Wired Hospitals is higher than the 47% adoption rate among all the U.S hospitals in 2011, as revealed in Huang and Chang’s 2012 study

Summary

Introduction

Investing in IT serves as a hospital’s commitment to all parties in healthcare, including patients [1]. By 2011, 47% of the U.S hospitals had provided interactive patient education contents on their Web sites [3]. By examining the 2015 Most Wired Hospitals, this study aimed to find out how patient education has been integrated on these best IT hospitals’ Web sites to serve the purposes of marketing and meeting online visitors’ needs. Patient education has been understood as an important part of IT development in a hospital because it can improve patient care, reduce hospital readmission rates, gain more patients, meet the regulatory compliance, cut cost for the hospital, insurers and the patients’ employers, decrease administrative tasks, and increase the overall efficiency within the healthcare market [4,5,6,7]. A 2008 survey among the Most Wired Hospitals found that patients favored hospitals with advanced IT; hospitals with best IT implementation tended to have a better overall assessment; the patient’s are more likely to recommend such hospitals [1]

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