Web sites prove useful for hospitals

With the relaunch of its three Web sites, officials at Coffee Health Group say their goal is to appeal to younger health care consumers.

"This is a visual generation, and we felt like it was important to put something on the site that was a little interactive," said Tom Whetstone, spokesman for the group that includes Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital and ECM East in Florence and Shoals Hospital in Muscle Shoals.

Research by the Pew Internet's American Life Project indicates that a more interactive and informative site could pay off for health care facilities as, increasingly, people are turning to hospital Web sites for any number of issues, from scheduling appointments, to getting directions, to viewing virtual tours of rooms.

"Consumers want to be in control of their health care decisions," said Dr. Nancy Auer, vice president of Medical Affairs at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, Wash. "There has always been a shroud of secrecy around medicine and health. Now, there's much more transparency in the information available to consumers."

In addition to sites such as WebMD, which offers health advice and even a symptom tracker, Web sites for individual hospitals are becoming more and more numerous. In order to meet consumer demand, however, these sites must evolve and allow for interactive portals to the medical world.

For Coffee, which has maintained Web sites for ECM and Shoals for almost a decade, this has meant the addition of virtual tours. Anyone can log on to the Web site and see suites in the Women's Pavilion, the apartment at J.W. Somer Rehabilitation Center or a room at the Senior Care Center.

"We can tell people about these places all day long, but it's more visual when we give them pictures," he said. "They get a 360-degree view of the different components and the individual rooms before they make a decision about where to go."

Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield also maintains a Web site. According to spokeswoman Julia Boughner, it too went through an upgrade this year.

Like Coffee, Keller's site was developed in response to increasing consumer demands to get information via the Internet.

"Initially, our audience was fairly young. However, we are seeing that age is not as much of a factor as it once was," Boughner said.

Thanks to the upgrade, she said, "we now have the capability for pre-registration, purchases from the gift shop for delivery to patient rooms, registration for events, employment applications, bill paying and, the most popular: password-protected photos of our newborn Keller babies."

The link for employment opportunities at Coffee is also one of the most popular, said Whetstone, with a close second coming from people looking for information about where to go for check-in, what to bring during a hospital stay and the rules and regulations concerning patient rights.

Boughner and Whetstone agree that both sites must continue to evolve to meet the changing needs of the consumer.

In Coffee's case, sites could soon include videos of proper hand-washing techniques or information on diseases such as seasonal flu. At Keller, it means additional links to other Web sites users could find helpful, such as to the Alabama Department of Public Health.

Michelle Rupe Eubanks can be reached at 740-5745 or michelle.eubanks@TimesDaily.com.

The Puget Sound Business Journal contributed to this report.