What is the average cost for building a healthcare website?

What is the average cost for building a healthcare website?

These are the top questions every healthcare marketer is asked when it’s time to revamp the website: How much will the website cost? What features will it include? Most importantly, how will it help the organization accomplish its objectives?

Also: How will the website help patients learn about our various service lines or areas of expertise? How will the site help patients get in touch with us?

In a marketing department, the digital marketing team is most likely responsible for supporting ongoing broadcast and traditional marketing efforts. The website is a huge component.

Factors to consider before a website revamp

1.) Rather than looking at the cost of the website, think about the value it can deliver. If the information’s accessible, look at business intelligence or analytics regarding the worth of a new patient, both short and long term. If you have access to a new patient that you wouldn’t have had before, what revenue does that bring in the first year? What is the lifetime value of that patient?

A healthcare system tends to have minimal turnover with patients. Once you get somebody in the door, he’s likely to work with you for the rest of his life. You can always determine the value of a website based on an anticipated number of patients it could bring in. Make this your No. 1 objective.

2.) Consider how the website’s features and functions support getting people in the door. From a hospital system to an individual medical office, this varies based on the level of competition in your market. So, look at the basics. Have enough information on the website to educate the patient about your organization, who the patient is to you, the patient’s condition, and your expertise with treating it. Then, provide a contact form with your phone number and address, so he can call to schedule an appointment. You could use online appointment scheduling software allowing him to schedule an appointment, fill out the forms, and just show up at the scheduled time and place.

Once you determine the value your site can deliver and the features it requires, you’re ready to approach your CEO or CMO. You may even discuss hiring a third party developer to design the website. Whenever you show the market outlook and the value of new patients, the website cost can pale in comparison to the overall return on investment.

The key factor is knowing the value of the website because every website is as unique as the health organization it represents. Then, determine what is right for your organization.

We worked with an organization that wanted to revamp its medical office website whose sole purpose was providing contact information–phone number, address and email address. The organization wanted to invest in a new website, but didn’t know where to start.

So, we first looked at the value of their patients–a particular type of patient and the average revenue gained when this patient paid direct or via the insurance company. On average, the organization saw about 2,000 patients per year in this particular line of service in this healthcare system. We looked at the overall value each patient provided from revenue per year to a lifetime value for a smaller segment of that audience.

From there, we built a plan to make the website more effective. We set up a guarantee that as long as the website and the associated search efforts attached to it brought in “X” number of patients through the website in a year, the organization would pay “Y.” If it didn’t, then we’d refund 25% of the cost–no questions asked.

Fortunately, the website was a huge success. Within the first two months of its launch, the organization saw a 200% increase in leads, and it has continued to escalate. The traffic via the website actually paid for itself in the first six months as opposed to the projected year-and-a-half that was anticipated.