Top Medical CMS: What Should Reliable Healthcare Providers Know To Get A Great One?

By Katrine Spirina, Market Analyst, OCSICO

Tech environment is evolving at incredible speed challenging the rooted principles of business processes within mid- and large-scale medical organizations. Healthcare providers feel the need for full or partial customization of latest solutions to rationalize the workflow and boost consumers’ loyalty.

What is the perfect way for providers to get their patients informed on new health-targeted services or changes in processes of medical provision? Owning a quality and engaging website corresponds to patients’ demands and aspirations.

To date, the healthcare industry is developing in line with some basic concepts: to make care services affordable, accessible for all, to increase response time and promote personalized treatment. Depending on the scale of organization or the number of services and consumers, the standards can be reached in the following ways: to implement a corporate solution or to adopt a simple but flexible CMS. A matter of paramount importance is to pick a future-oriented approach to acquire a competitive, scalable and up-to-the-minute system.

What Consumers Expect

Many hospitals and healthcare centers come up with the issue of employing “the best medical CMS.” In fact, the choice should stem from the consumers’ requirements, technical capabilities, staff skills, budgeting and so on. A quality CMS ought to enable a cluster of capabilities to deal with universal glitches in provider-consumer cooperation.

1. Medical web platforms, ideally, should be managed by professionals in the domain. However, savvy medical specialists are engaged in life-saving activities, whereas non-experts create relevant content. To bridge the competence gap of a common medical content manager, the CMS should be customizable to particular needs. It has to enable the integrated workflow that helps medical experts and marketing specialists to collaborate over patient-engaging content, specify, verify and approve it.
2. Multisite options are vital for medical facilities that distribute information through different websites in order to match a platform with certain patients’ needs (e.g. create a stand-alone surgery site and sort out specific information from general physician sites). Chosen CMS is expected to be scalable, resilient and capable of handling complex changes all over consumers’ websites.
3. A number of internal information systems, such as time-tracking, appointment scheduling or medication inventory management systems, have front-end integration with CMS. Employed by a large number of users inside and outside medical institutions, the CMS requires secure and on-demand tech support.
4. A quality website has a positive impact on providers’ image. Medical web pages and portals should contribute to professional corporate identity. It is possible due to flawless multiplatform functioning enabled by an impeccable CMS.
5. E-commerce takes up a significant part of many industries. Experts the growth of health and personal care market by 2020, whilst medical care services are not like any other products. E-commerce modules should be flexible and adaptive to the industry requirements, such as the following:

• Provide comprehensive information on medical services
• Demonstrate well-structured sections of services, surveys, drugs, medical professionals, etc.
• Provide cross-references with doctors’ competence areas, lists of cataloged medications, results of medical surveys and more
• Enable semi-automated patient support
• Offer appointment scheduling based on doctor’s reception hours

The aforementioned capabilities constitute the basis that a consumer should be aware of when picking a medical CMS. There are a number of popular systems that primarily draw the attention of individuals and enterprises. Off-the-shelf solutions present many useful features, but the question is whether such systems fully comply with the demanding industry standards or not? The overview of some top medical CMS for healthcare providers will help to clarify the matter.

What CMS Domain Offers

Is WordPress healthy for medical websites?

This leading open-source solution powers almost 25 percent of the websites around the globe. The user-friendly interface and competitive functionality set the platform aside. It arms different types of users with a great number of free and paid plugins for enhancement and simplification of content management workflow, provides thousands of themes consistent with multi-platform websites, and more.

But all that doesn’t shape a perfect solution. WordPress often launches new updates and improvements that, in fact, cannot be adopted by all sites indiscriminately. Large medical organizations can face troubles maintaining their websites. Newly incorporated updates may conflict with the site design and customized features. To cap it all, as an open-source system, WordPress is subjected to hacker attacks despite some plugins offered to mitigate the risks.

Seems like this widely used CMS fully answers medical websites’ needs? Perhaps, it is better to set your mind on another solution…

Drupal provides websites with clean bill of health

Another open and scalable framework is on the short list of excellent medical CMS. This CMS platform is supported by numerous web solutions providers and allows users to enjoy extended customization capabilities. Drupal perfectly serves the needs of governmental organizations e.g. Department of Defense and even the White House. Nevertheless, the needs of healthcare industry differ from other business fields. Drupal requires advanced skills from developers to craft a highly customizable solution. Does it make sense to opt for a hard-to-use system to tackle complex medical web resources? Also, this CMS is not compatible with many existing systems employed by healthcare providers.

Can Magento cure all failures?

It is an open-source e-commerce platform that has gained popularity in creating web drugstores and other e-commerce sites. For the development of end-to-end solutions in compliance with healthcare regulations, Magento presents splendid themes and high-end functionalities: great SEO features, analytics reports, adaptability to mobile devices, payment and shipping options, integration with third-party solutions and more useful tools for web stores. So, in case a customer is looking for the development of a medical web-store, Magneto is a tried-and-true solution. But is a web store the healthcare providers' core need? Seems like they are more concerned with the management of complex healthcare web content, profound options for larger scale of customization and higher performance of websites. Perhaps, it is necessary to go on looking for a CMS solution.

 Joomla fuels health and sound solution

If that were true…The popularity of the platform among the developers of e-commerce systems affects the solution globally: too often it endures hacker attacks which cannot be completely prevented by whatever open-source system. This CMS is easy to customize and extend, it provides great financial capabilities to customers’ websites, but it is not the way out for medical facilities that prioritize security to patient data. The based version of this platform primarily suits small- and medium-sized websites and requires the involvement of expert consultants into the development process.

The Bottom Line

A professional healthcare website cannot commence with an idea of finding a perfect CMS since there are no universal systems. Large-scale medical organizations can afford significant expenditures on enterprise solutions, as for instance Adobe Experience Management (AEM).

As a key player on the CMS market, AEM allows, inter alia, to access and maintain numerous specific websites from one single platform, enables modification of the web content by numerous contributors, provides a high level of security and scalability. In sum, it could be a perfect medical CMS, if not for its focus on Creative Cloud. This feature seems to be redundant for running medical platforms since there is not so much regularly published and modified content.

One of the best players on the market is Sitecore opposed by SharePoint. As a .NET based solution, Sitecore provides excellent capabilities to enhance customer experience and promote digital marketing strategies. It features balanced and user-friendly interface and meets both front-end and back-end requirements for medical websites. The solution also stands out among others due to advanced design capabilities that suggest corporate identity to all websites of a medical organization.

Sitecore supports integration with SharePoint, a popular CRM solution for building internal web portals. It enables a number of distinguishing features, such as the following: document management tools that answer the needs of healthcare providers; focus on collaboration and sharing options that streamline doctor-patient communication. Nonetheless, the solution demands comprehensive development and support and matches simple non-dynamic websites first.

Is something still missing? Yes. A custom medical solution will undoubtedly benefit image and reliability of a healthcare provider. In order to choose a great CMS, it is sensible to leave the issue to an experienced business analyst who represents a reputable healthcare software vendor. The expert will conduct an all-round analysis of all business processes, e-commerce segment and strategic objectives of a healthcare organization. The robust and quality assistance will result in drawing up a business specification and will guide healthcare providers to the choice of a great CMS and a value-adding approach.

About The Author

Katrine Spirina is a Market Analyst with OCSICO. Her professional interest lies above all in cutting-edge trends and innovations in Healthcare, Fleet Management, IoT and Custom Software Development. Contact Katrine via Katrine.Spirina@ocsico.com to discuss tips & opinions on the tech development of industries.