Free Medical Website creation services

Dr Colin Mendelsohn has published an article on free websites and directory listings in Australian Doctor (Aug 25) titled Free & Easy on free websites and directory listings.

These include:

• Your Health - www.yourhealth.net.au. Which provides a free website when you sign up for their practice newsletter service.
• MyDr - www.mydr.com.au. Which provides a free website but links back to CMPMedica's medical information and advertising funded website.
• FamilyGP - www.familygp.com.au. Sponsored by MS&D.

Australian Doctor also publishes an interesting articleon 26 August titled WebPresence.com which quotes the cost of a website at between $3000-$10,000 so a free service can certainly save money.

The key of course is to carefully evaluate the benefits and shortcomings of any approach, the budget within which you are operating and what you are trying to achieve.

GP Website Option: Your Health newsletter service

Here is one way to get a medical website built for you for Australian GPs.

YourHealth is actually a subscription newsletter service that you pay for so that you can send relevant news in a hardcopy newletter format to your patients four times a year if you are a GP. As part of this service they provide "a free, personalised practice website". That includes:

Personalised practice information

All past articles from Your Health newsletter in a searchable database

Reliable health links

Extensive evidence-based health information, such as a guide to medicines, medical dictionary, health tools and calculators, healthy recipes etc.

An appointment booking facility

Health Update emails. Patients can register to receive updates of relevant health news by email....

Details of the service

• Cost: Depends on the number of newsletters you wish to distribute. ($585-<$5000 for 250-5000 copies per quarter)
• Technical expertise required: None - they will create the website for you although you can also add additional pages of practice information, images and maps.
  
• Benefits: As well as a website you get a professional looking patient newsletter including a newsletter management facility and integration between your website and newsletter (ie if you change doctors or doctor's details on the website it flows through to the newsletter).
  
• Limitations: The website has a standard look and feel and it is not currently optimised to be found on the web.

They claim the service is already used by over 300 GP practices. You can see samples and more information at the Your Health website.

How to set up your website: The hosted page or blog option

Following on from the previous article about the options for an online presences for health professionals here is some detail about hosted pages and blogs for medical professionals.

A hosted page for medical professionals 

This option involves providing your content to a third party and listing it on an online directory or free listing service. The format is often prescriptive and limited.

Examples: Health Directory, Yellow Pages, Enterprise Search

Advantages: cheap (often free), profiles your page amongst a community of other (relevant sites).

Disadvantages: least flexible, you can't use your own domain name, you can't edit the structure of the pages.

A blog for health professionals

A blog or weblog is basically a website built around the metaphor of a diary. You write an entry in your diary daily, weekly or monthly. The most recent entry is displayed first. Usually a blog is used to start a two way conversation with an audience. The same technology however can be used to present information that is not updated frequently such as practice contact details etc. 

Examples: Blogger, WordPress 

Advantages: cheap (sometimes free), blogs are often found more easily by search engines because of their fresh content, provides a 2 way dialog

Disadvantages: is clumsy in handling large amounts of infrequently changing information

Note: some allow you to bring your own domain name (cost $15-$30/yr) so that if in the future you wish to move your content or set up a fully fledged website you can.

In the next article in the series I'll touch upon a range of web hosting options.