Health websites -- how to differentiate content for the general public vs health professionals

[Sheila Walsh]

I'm working on one section within  a fairly large health website with two key audiences: health professionals and the general public. I've been tasked with finding a way to clearly differentiate content for health professionals vs content for the general public. The client does not wish to publish health professional content on a separate website, and they would prefer not to make radical changes since they are one part of a larger website. 

Here are some things I can do:

* Change the way content is labeled. (But how do you label content for the general public -- I've seen it labeled as "for consumers" or "for patients," but neither label seems to fit.)

* Make small changes to the design, perhaps icons for health professional information.

* Change the information architecture.

Can anyone suggest the following:

* In general, ways to approach this task

* Examples of best practices -- Websites that serve health professionals and the general public and do a good job of differentiating content for both audiences

* Tips on how to implement audience segmentation

* Labels for content for the general public?

I would appreciate any suggestions or sample websites to review. Thanks so much!

Sheila Walsh

[Hilary Marsh]

Hi Sheila,

My initial recommendation would be to ask about their priorities. If the general public is their top priority, give content about that the most prominence on the home page and in the nav, and have health professionals go to a separate section for them.

As for your question about labels, and if the health site is about a particular health challenge, you could describe the consumers in terms of their relationship with that challenge. "Gluten-free curious," or something like that, for example. For the pros, I think "healthcare professionals" is pretty universal.

Good luck on the project!

--Hilary

Sheila Walsh

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[Rick Yagodich]

My recommendation comes at this from a different angle, based on some experience of health sites aimed at professional audiences. Is the for-professionals content intended to be accessible by the general public? Does it include value-add? If it is supposed to be sectioned off and adds value, then you could have professionals register… and then the for-professionals content only shows to those who are logged in.

This allows for tight integration between the two parts, if relevant, or a difference in navigational emphasis if you don't want the cross-linking.

 - R

[Frederick Faulkner IV]

Hi Sheila, 

I know your pain and challenges.  I agree with Hilary that you need to ask the client who the priority audience is.  In my experience this is an easier question to ask than answer.  Some things to consider and approaches to take. 

1) if the organization can be specific enough as to the difference between a professional and the public the labels could be easier to figure out.  However, in all of my experience it comes down to "for professionals" and "for patients".  

2) Another approach if you can get the priority question answered is to focus the navigation and content to the primary audience and focus a smaller section to the secondary audience.  I recently worked with a client where we went away from the audience navigation approach and focused the majority of the navigation to the primary audience (professionals) and took one tab of the navigation and made it a different color and called it "patients".  Not the best label, but it works in this case.  

3) Color can ba a great way-finding cue.  Can your client implement possibly a different color scheme to the public content vs. professional content?  There may be needs to cross link content between the two, but at least there will be a visual indicator that the content is targeted to a different audience. 

4) Finally, I think the biggest thing you can do is use terminology that works for each audience.  Public need layman terms and content organization that fits their mindset.  I have a symptom.  I need to learn more about a condition and treatment options.  Health professionals think more scientific and have specific terminology that works for them due to their training.  So they don't think about conditions as much as outcomes and results.  

I hope that helps.  

Fred

Frederick L. Faulkner IV
faul...@gmail.com
Follow me on Twitter: FredFaulknerIV
Read more at www.about.me/FredFaulknerIV

[Sophie Dennis]

Totally agree that first thing is to identify which group are the primary audience. Your task is then to clearly label content which is more suited to the other. 

I've worked with organisations where the primary audience is health professionals. Content identified as particularly suited to parents/carers/patients was tagged as such in the database. We then used an icon to indicate "parent/patient-friendly" content in general listings, and also created a section which pulled out just those articles all in one place. On labelling I would stick to something simple and obvious like "for patients" and not over-analyse it. 

The issue of whether to lock away professional content is an interesting one. Working with the leading patient organisation for the syndrome in question, they advised very strongly that many patients *do* want access to in-depth, scientific, professional medical material - even if they don't have the expertise to necessarily understand all of it. While may patients do need things explaining in more accessible, lay terms, it is quite patronising to assume that patients never want nor are able to understand medical material or language. This is particularly true if you are dealing with long term or life-long conditions, where patients frequently become over time more expert than some of the professionals treating them. Unless there is a strong case that patients should not have access to particular information, I would be in favour of leaving as much as possible open access.

[Ginny Redish]

Hi Sheila --

In addition to the great suggestions from others, I suggest you look at the National Cancer Institute's web site (NCI).

www.cancer.gov

For every type of cancer, they have information under two tabs:

Patient Version

Health Professional Version

See, for example, 

http://cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/treatment/bladder/Patient

http://cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/treatment/bladder/HealthProfessional

Both tabs are always available to everyone.

Through usability testing and other usability studies, the folks responsible for this site found that both audiences -- the public and health professionals -- value having both versions available to them. 

Health professionals read the patient version to see if they should recommend it to their patients and to find good words to use when talking about the topic with patients and patients' families.

The public starts with the patient version and sometimes moves on to the health professional version.

For many people, dealing with a health concern is a journey. They start wanting the most basic information about the health concern. As they deal with the health concern, they become more sophisticated, more used to the medical jargon, and want more in-depth information.

What you are trying to achieve may be different from the purposes that www.cancer.gov is trying to fulfill, but you might find inspiration in looking at how the folks at NCI handle the issue you asked about.

Best,

Ginny

Janice (Ginny) Redish, Ph.D.
Redish & Associates, Inc.
Bethesda, MD 20817

301 229 3039
www.redish.net
Twitter: @GinnyRedish 

LinkedIn: Ginny Redish

Author of Letting Go of the Words -- Writing Web Content that Works

second edition,  2012

[Suz Bednarz]

Shelia - I may be able to help.  I work for a large healthcare firm where we have a corporate flag ship site (largely sales lead generation/marketing) that addresses the audiences you reference as well as some you dont.

My team also supports separate portals for the healthcare professionals and the covered members. 

Feel free to write me and I can share more info, experiences. 

[David Sturtz]

Hi Sheila - 

Fantastic question and great responses. It's definitely important to understand the business goals here and how each audience contributes to those goals. Audience-based navigation (especially novice vs. expert) generally makes me nervous for the reasons that Sophie and Ginny describe.

I might focus first on what various users need to *do* in relation to the content, how the content supports those tasks, and then see how much overlap there really is among the audiences. That could help you decide between a separate section approach like Frederick describes (no. 2) or a more integrated approach, such as Ginny's cancer.gov example.

That might also lead you to some labeling that would allow users to appropriately self-select: How to Make an Appointment  vs. Refer a Patient, or Taking an Antidepressant vs. Prescribing SSRIs, etc. At that point, visually ordering and grouping items into a logical flow could provide additional differentiation.

Be careful not to lose sight of the difference between using complex vocabulary (precise, domain-specific terminology) and using complex sentence construction. I see a lot of 'for healthcare professionals' content that is complex in both ways. Doctors need web-friendly, scannable content too -- perhaps even more so!

Hope that is helpful,

David

[Malcolm Davison]

I agree David.

I have no background or practical knowledge of medical, pharmaceutical or healthcare issues. But I have trained doctors and researchers in the UK, at the EC in Brussels, Germany and look forward, in the next few weeks, to teaching NHS professionals in Scotland and authors in a pharmaceutical company in Scandinavia.

I have found that the more complex the nature of their communication the more that authors appreciate learning how to communicate more clearly and simply. There is evidence that over complex, poorly laid out web text is a serious barrier to progress in research.

Simple English is even more important today as so much search is now exchanged internationally across language barriers.

The same, incidentally, applies to other professions and areas of science.

Conversely, the simpler the nature of the business the more that people want to try and mask this fact by unnecessarily constructing complex text.

Malcolm Davison
Managing director
www.writingfortheweb.co.uk

[Ioana Radian]

Putting content on password protected pages will not only be an impediment for users, it will effectively keep search engines out of it, negatively affecting SEO and resulting in less traffic. Apart from its own value, the content for professionals can also help rank the pages for the general public.

2013/5/17 Malcolm Davison <in...@writingfortheweb.co.uk>

[Sheila Walsh]

Wow...What a great group! Thank you for all the great responses...I will take a little time to review them and discuss with the client. Clearly I need to spark some deeper discussion of the target audience. I'm also looking into the content management system and how we can tag content to serve up content by audience. 

Someone off-list suggested I review fda.gov as well.  

Back to the drawing board...will follow up with the group with any useful findings or information.

Many thanks,

Sheila 

[Brett Lee]

Hi Sheila,

Great advice here so far. I thought I'd also add exploring and analysing the relationship between the two audiences from a content perspective. After all, just because someone is a healthcare professional doesn't necessarily mean they want to read jargony or acronym-ladened versions of information. But if they have different information needs, it's worth investigating where they diverge.

I'm currently working through a project for post-secondary education where we have content that is by default geared towards all students. But some pages have content elements that are audience-specific (we have identified five such special audiences). For instance, international students often have different processes that they go through to complete common tasks. Writing out general content for all students and then creating visually differentiated but supplementary content for special audiences is a reasonable solution for us, based on the assumption that international students are a subset of students.

[Carolyn Wood]

Great answers. Because of family health issues over the years, I've had to do a lot of research on the web, and I also used to write separate brochures for patients and brochures for healthcare professionals on the same topics in the olden days of print.

Even if you are a generally well-informed, highly educated person, if you just learned you MIGHT have a particular condition or that you just found out that you do have a serious condition, having access to both levels of information is great. You are able, on the cancer.gov site, to read the patients only section. Later, when you can handle it, or you realize you'll need to do more research on your own, you'll know exactly where to look for more in-depth information. My main complaint about that page, though, is how those two labels aren't designed in an obvious way. As I took a quick look at the page, I didn't even see the two choices in the nav! Believe me, that sort of thing has to be very clear, especially when someone is in shock, depression, suffering from “chemo brain” (a real condition), etc. I also like how it defaults to the patient view. The site is poorly designed: very unattractive, with too much happening and not enough clear differentiation or whitespace, but I like how they have separated the two views (except for not making it obvious enough). 

And, yes to the making info clear and easily skimmed for the healthcare professionals. They also need to quickly determine if this valuable info for them or just the same-old stuff, they are usually in a hurry, yet they still need to be able to grasp the nuances, assess the reliability of the information, etc. 

Ginny makes an interesting point about doctors needing to assess whether this is good information to give their patients. My immediate family members have been through many conditions or died from them, including leukemia, lymphoma, breast cancer, brain tumors… well, the list goes on and on. Not one doctor has ever recommended that any of us go on the web for more information. The very thought horrifies them. I can't imagine any of them even vetting a page for this purpose. I wonder if this will change as doctors feel more of a squeeze as the healthcare system changes, or what organizations can do to change this.  

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[Sheila Walsh]

Thanks, Carolyn, for your reply. In usability testing, I've frequently observed participants who do not see tabs such as the one you mentioned on cancer.gov. So you are not alone. 

I agree that everyone should be able to view the more detailed health professional content but that the default view should be general public content.

Sheila