E-BUSINESS

I’m blogging about physician communications, more specifically physician online communications using Internet technology. I am not a physician; my work responsibilities are highly interdependent and support the work flow and relationships of primary care and specialty care physicians. I have been working in the field of Internet technology and health care for the past 10 years and have been in health care for 25+ years. I’m employed in a large integrated health care delivery system in the Midwest, Community Health Network, Indianapolis IN. We don’t have all the answers. We strive to be one of the leading systems in the U.S. in the arena of inpatient and ambulatory care, electronic medical record utilization.

My intent is to share thoughts and ideas about our experiences related to physician communications using technology such as intranets, extranets, blogs, corporate and personal email, IM, texting, and new media techniques with streaming audio and video. From my preliminary investigations, I have found limited research on the web or blogosphere specific to this important topic. So my agenda is to put some content in play and begin to contribute to that void for any interested individuals or groups to benefit from benefit from. Please comment honestly, directly and respectfully.

When creating a mobile website, several adjustments or considerations need to be made.  Obviously, you don’t just port your current website, optimized for a monitor, over to a mobile site.

You need to build the site as if you were building a site for dial-up users.  The download/upload speeds on smart phones are not yet comparable to the speed of a broadband connection.  Image sizes need to be minimized and html simplified.

The page layout needs to be more vertical than the page design for display on a monitor.  The user on a smart phone will be scrolling up and down to look at the page and the screen resolution is not very wide.  Also, the page length should be kept as short as possible to avoid long, endlessly scrolling pages.

Applications need to keep this rule in mind also.  The forms should only contain a few fields of data entry because it is more difficult to enter data on a phone than a keyboard and the load times will be slower.

The most important consideration, I feel is to make sure that what you put on a mobile makes sense for the user to use.  An obvious example is that you wouldn’t put an application on a mobile site that requires the user to print a page.  Less obvious is applications that can be built with all the other requirements in mind, but don’t consider whether the user will use them or not, don’t consider the process.  We can build a mobile site that has the full features of our Find a Doctor application, including the ability to compare physicians and request appointments, but we realized that a patient would not be doing that on their phone.  A patient would be looking up a doctor’s phone number, location, office hours, etc.

So that’s what we built:  http://mobile.eCommunity.com.

Take a look at the site and see if you agree or disagree with what I’ve said here, or have comments about the site.

We just made an update to the Find a Doctor application on eCommunity.com, basically an update to correct some application flow issues.  One of the major issues was our attempt to stop users from using the back button because it was causing issues with the session and search results of the application.  It was causing several unintended effects like not being able to come back to a profile page or leave a profile page each occurred in a different set of circumstances.

Shouldn’t have done this in the first place.

Attempting to stop back button use is a major usability must-not-do.  There are many articles and books and web pages discussing this usability problem.  Probably the most famous is Jakob Nielsen’s “The Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 1999” which still applies today.

I recently read his book “Prioritizing Web Usability” (written with Hoa Loranger) which was published in 2006 and many of the usability problems that he wrote about in 1999 are still relevant today and relevant for the future.  It shows how timeless design issues can be and that developers who don’t understand the past are doomed to repeat design mistakes of earlier developers.

We have redesigned and reorganized the Web site for The Indiana Heart Hospital. We will continue to build it out and add more functionality over the next week. Take a look and let us know your comments!

www.HeartHospital.com

P.S. Coming soon…a new Web site to commemorate the Next Evolution of Community Hospital South. Look for it around the groundbreaking on June 17 at www.eCommunity.com/south