Are you looking for tips on online healthcare marketplace development? Learn how to develop a user-friendly marketplace and test your results.
In general, online healthcare marketplaces can advertise several things: services of medical professionals, medical procedures, and medicaments. You can start working with several types of content for maximum exposure or choose a particular type to test your business model.
Alternatively, you can focus on a particular field of medicine, such as oncology, gynecology, psychotherapy, ophthalmology, dentistry, etc. Companies with a more narrow specialization can deliver a better quality of work as they always keep track of the latest developments in their field. Consequently, they are perceived as more authoritative by their clients.
It is worth noting, however, that if you are planning to grow beyond a single field, it might be prudent to avoid controversial or pseudoscientific fields, like homeopathy and other types of alternative medicine.
Within the healthcare field, the single most important feature any product must have and convey is a high level of expertise. All the descriptions of medications, medical procedures, and conditions must be accurate. Remember, a mistake can shatter the trust of a potential client. There are several general rules you need to follow when gathering information.
No matter what type of medical products or services you advertise, the information you choose to use or act upon must be considered only when it comes from resources managed or proofread by medical experts. It goes without saying, but Wikipedia, for instance, cannot be considered as such. You can fact-check through the links its articles provide, though.
Whenever you advertise services of medical experts, it is highly advisable to check their qualifications and credentials.
When marketing medical products, go beyond the official description on a company website. Check whether the product is approved by the government authority of the country where it will be available for sale. For the USA it’s The United States Food and Drug Administration (or FDA for short). For European Union, it’s EMA (The European Medicines Agency).
You can hire a part-time or a full-time medical professional to review the information that you plan to upload to your website before you upload it. If you choose to specialize in a certain field of medicine, it might be better if the person you employ has detailed knowledge of that particular field.
Chances are that vendors already sell products and services they would want to advertise on your marketplace. Are customers who bought them satisfied? If you have the resources to do it, gather reviews. They should help you identify products/services of bad quality beforehand. Higher customer satisfaction rates equal higher customer retention rates, and you don’t want to let vendors who don’t do a good job offer services on your platform.
Remember, the reviews, the authors of which you can trace and verify carry more weight. If there is contact info, you can reach out to a person to learn more about the experience they had.
As it was mentioned in the previous section, credentials are important on both sides.
Provide space for your vendors to place information about their credentials. This will help them convey their level and area of expertise to the marketplace’s customers. Those who are in doubt will be reassured.
A healthcare marketplace should be and feel like a safe space, allowing your customers to leave reviews and, perhaps even communicate with one another via a forum. Nonetheless, less truthful companies might try to hire someone to write insincere reviews about them or their competition. To prevent this from happening, ask customers to provide some form of identification before they can start reviewing vendors. Also, you might want to restrict them to commenting only on the products and/or services that they bought via your platform.
Having a blog or a news section that is regularly maintained is very good for any online business. First of all, it reinforces the perception of legitimacy and expertise that should be part of your brand’s identity.
Secondly, it gives your clients more chances to find you. Someone might be searching the web, looking for accurate information about their condition, and stumble upon one of your articles.
Thirdly, having a website section where new, high-quality, unique articles regularly appear, is a strong search engine optimization strategy. This will tell Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and other search engines to show your webpages higher in the results for relative queries.
In Healthcare development, strong security is not a “nice-to-have” feature, it is a governmental requirement. Needless to say that private information, from name and social security number to information about health and possible conditions, can be used by fraudulent companies and individuals to harass and con people. To protect their citizens, different countries have set guidelines on what security measures they should employ. It might include facility and server security, personnel training, cybersecurity, and more.
Those who plan to work in the USA must comply with HIPAA standards.
Once your platform is online, you can analyze and make conclusions. You need to pay attention to both your customers and your vendors. First, let us talk about customers. Analyze where they are coming from. What are your conversion rates? Are they better or worse than the average for your industry?
Determine what time of day your users are most active. This might help you execute more efficient advertising campaigns.
Analyze the customer journey as a whole. How many steps does it include? Can you lower this number?
Analyze each page of the website individually. Is there a certain point where many customers choose to abandon their intentions of making a purchase? If so, you might want to work on the user interface of that page.
Now think about your vendors. How do you attract them? What is the retention rate? How successful are they on your platform? If any of them struggle to convert visitors into customers, what might be the reason behind it? Do less successful vendors have something in common?
Reach out to your vendors. Getting feedback from every website visitor might be a hard trick to pull, but you can absolutely do this with vendors. Ask them what they are missing. What features could help them to sell or promote their products and services better?
Creating an online healthcare marketplace is a worthy process, with many companies already thriving in the field. As the pandemic unfolded, the demand for this type of service has only increased. A good example of a successful healthcare marketplace provider nowadays is the Docplanner group. It operates in 20 countries, being a market leader in 12 of them. The necessary precautions taken by governments, healthcare providers, and patients have also increased the need for services of telemedicine marketplaces, like Ping An Good Doctor.
The process of creating a similar, successful venture, as we have mentioned, includes several steps that must be taken seriously. Build your reputation from point zero - market only trusted products and services. Make your platform a safe environment by requesting participants to provide proof of identity. Consider posting articles regularly. Protect your clients and their data. And, most important - constantly evolve.
