Innovation, influence and business in America's medical cities.

Dr. John D. Halamka is chief information officer and dean for technology at Harvard Medical School who writes at Life as a Healthcare CIO.

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Over the past two years, I’ve witnessed a transition in modern website design from plain text and static information to multimedia centric and interactive. I’ve written about the new BIDMC website we implemented to meet patient expectations for a modern website.

Many healthcare organizations I work with are considering content managed, new media, highly interactive web 2.0 sites. I thought it would be useful to describe how we approached the BIDMC website so you can leverage our experience.

Content Management – BIDMC has a great deal of .NET expertise, so we wanted a content management system that worked well in our .NET/SQL Server 2008 environment. SiteCore has been ideal for us, providing content templates, distributed content management, and publishing workflow in a load balanced, secure, virtualized environment. At HMS we use Drupal and WordPress for content management. They also work well for hosting institutional web sites.

Interactive features – The Corporate Communications folks at BIDMC really wanted high interactivity. We built and bought the components they needed as follows:

Blogs – Uses a SiteCore provided blogging module

Chat – a commercial application called Cute Chat from CuteSoft.

BIDMC TV (news and information videos produced by BIDMC)- Hosted by BrightCove.

Medical Edge (videos about innovation produced by BIDMC)- Hosted by BrightCove.

Podcast Gallery – Hosted on BIDMC servers.

Health Quizzes – created using a commercial application called SelectSurvey.NET from ClassApps.

Social Networking – entirely hosted by outside service providers (Facebook/Twitter/You Tube).

Secure patient web pages for communication with their families – a commercial application provided by CarePages.

Conditions A-Z – a web-based encyclopedia branded for BIDMC using commercial reference provided by Ebsco.

Search Engine – We’re using a Google Appliance

Thus, the combination of SiteCore plus purchased interactive applications and externally hosted streaming video has worked very well to provide our patients with an information rich, interactive experience.

I hope this is useful to you as you implement your own hospital websites.