How St. John Health grows its customer base by leveraging its website

Pam Hedman, for HealthLeaders News, August 7, 2007

St. John Health provides quality medical care to millions of patients across the Detroit area. The health system has grown into the area's largest, with nine hospitals, 125 medical locations and more than 3,000 physicians. Our website, www.stjohn.org, is a critical business tool and connection with the community, patients, healthcare providers and others.

Several years ago, we realized we were relying mainly on gut instinct and anecdotal feedback to determine how well our website was meeting site visitors' needs. We could count the volume of visits, but we didn't have a scientific way to gauge who was coming to our website and why, let alone measure the web's effectiveness in supporting customer acquisition initiatives. In 2003, we turned to ForeSee Results to measure online customer satisfaction, applying the proven and scientific methodology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). We received valuable and surprising insights that allowed us to make improvements to our site that would advance our corporate goals on a number of fronts.

Satisfaction insight #1: Site visitor composition is different than expected
When we started measuring our website with ForeSee Results, we found that job-seekers, who are not part of our primary target audience, comprised 56 percent of actual site visitors. This number was far higher than expected. Interestingly, these job-seekers also browsed other areas of the site looking for healthcare and physician information. Based on these findings, we separated the job opening information so that people looking for positions could go immediately to the information they needed. In addition, we emphasized the health information content so job-seekers could also use the site as a health resource.

Satisfaction Insight #2: Search is a top priority
We were faced with a common challenge--making our website easy for users to search for specific information. "Voice of customer" data analyzed using the ACSI methodology showed that improvements to search would have a significant impact on increasing satisfaction and loyalty. Therefore, we made a series of small, incremental improvements to our search experience, including eliminating confusing search results, enhancing the meta tags and enabling people to search by both medical and lay terms (e.g. hypertension and high blood pressure). The percentage of site visitors who found the search descriptions helpful increased 13 percent based on these changes. In addition, we enhanced the content of our website so that it was more focused on specific disease information and other topics of interest to the community, while also enhancing the site's navigation and look and feel.

Satisfaction Insight #3: Online transactions drive ROI
Like many businesses, we are increasingly using our website for transactions that were previously conducted in person or on the phone. One important online transactional tool is the "find a physician" tool. Based on data collected on our website, we enhanced the tool to make it more user-friendly for both patients looking for doctors and for doctors looking for other physicians for referrals--key to business growth. The physician directory functionality had a huge impact on increasing site traffic and introducing new customers to St. John. The percentage of people coming to the site to find a physician rose 125 percent from August 2003 to August 2006. During the same time period, the number of site visitors with a St. John doctor grew 37.5 percent.

In addition, we added a very popular interactive cancer risk assessment tool and functionality for pre-registration and appointment scheduling to our website. Besides making these services more convenient for patients, putting them online makes it easy for the health system to track ROI--and quantify the contribution of the website to the bottom line.

ForeSee Results' customer satisfaction analysis helps us look at our website from the customers' perspective. The customer data informs budget decisions to help me and my staff secure the funding we need for website initiatives. Specific results include:

• Increased Site Traffic: St. John's website traffic grew 138 percent from June 2003 through June 2006, supported by site improvements and added functionality that attracted many new and returning site visitors.
  
• Customer Acquisition: By integrating web data with our CRM database, St. John has found that 15 percent of people conducting transactions online become new patients, an impressive statistic. St. John tracks annual revenue for new patients using the website and we have exceeded our new patient goals for the past two years.
  
• High Physician Satisfaction: Physician satisfaction is high and one in five physicians who visit the site are coming to research a referral in the St. John network. Also, of the physicians who used the search function on the site, 83 percent found what they were looking for.
  
• Feedback from Web Used throughout Organization: Many departments have come to rely on feedback coming through the satisfaction analysis and open-ended questions, especially the HR department, which faces enormous recruiting challenges for nurses and other personnel.

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Pam Hedman is Web Center director at St. John Health. She can be reached at pam.hedman@stjohn.org.