Are Hospital Websites A Waste of Time and Money?
After a brief “surf” around a random sample of the 888-more-or-less hospital websites on the Internet, it is abundantly clear that most of these hospitals should have saved their time, effort, and money unless the only thing they were constructed for was hospital ego-building – in which case, they are smashing successes. The sad part is that most of them have valuable information that could help their patients and improve the hospital’s over-all image and performance if only the patients could find that information. Without getting overly technical, the collective wisdom of net-commentators is that 95% of the websites online “suck” but almost 40% are making money – the lesson is that, at the moment, even “bad sites” will produce positive results. As competition grows, however, the “good sites” really begin to out-distance the “bad” ones and drive them out of business. The 60% that are bad and failing then announce to the world that the “web does not work”. What hospitals need to unders
