If you’re looking to highlight your institution and gain more referrals, you’ll need to showcase the doctors that work at your hospital. We recently read a Ragan’s Health Care Communication News article, “8 Awesome Ways to Feature Docs on Your Website,” discussing how to position and showcase physicians.

Here are five helpful suggestions:

  • Pictures: By showcasing pictures of doctors communicating with patients, visitors see your doctors as credible, reliable, caring, and human. You can include these pictures on several areas of your website, such as an ‘about us’ section or an ‘our doctors’ section for example.
  • Scrolling marquis: Spotlight specific doctors by including their name, credentials and a quote. The quotes should discuss different aspects of patient care, while others highlight your hospital’s strengths. This will not only easily allow visitors to gain more of an understanding about your institution and your doctors, but will also entice them to explore your site longer. Another key element to include is a “find a doctor” box on the homepage so that visitors can research specific doctors in their specific fields.
  • Showcase expertise: Include a page that displays each doctor’s credentials, contact information, and a brief biography about them. Make it as convenient as possible for your visitors to navigate the biography by organizing it in a way that caters to the specific type of information your visitors may be searching for. In addition, you can include small segments on the homepage that illustrate your doctors in a more personal light, such as a description on how they relate to their field of expertise because of family or friends.
  • Take advantage of free press: Include links to videos or articles that display public appearances. This enables doctors to receive even more credibility from visitors who see it. Another way to display a physician’s knowledge and expertise is by including a brief video of a doctor explaining a certain medical procedure.
  • Engage physicians as content contributors: If you have a feature that shows answers from doctors on medical material, but that is answered in a way that patients or visitors can easily understand, it will allow physicians to be seen as knowledgeable about their practice and specialties. An additional way to display a doctor’s credibility is by having them write brief blog posts around specific medical topics.

Featuring physicians online will create more awareness of their clinical ability to perform and show them as compassionate, relatable figures.

If you’re in healthcare, insurance, technology or other professional services industries, and need help with a PR, marketing or social media campaign, contact Scott Public Relations.

Like what you’ve read? Follow Scott Public Relations on Facebook , Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+. For convenient blog updates, sign up for the Einsight RSS feed!

(Note: Many internet browser platforms are discontinuing their internal RSS reader. If you are viewing this in Google Chrome the RSS feed will not work properly since they discontinued Google Reader. If you have an independent reader set up already you should be fine. If you do not, may we suggest you look to Digg Reader, AOL Reader, or our personal favorite – Feedly to handle your RSS feeds. Happy reading.)