What I Learned from Making the Website of the Cleveland Clinic Hospitalists

As some of you probably know, I am a staff physician at the Section of Hospital Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. Being one of the largest academic hospitalist groups in the country, I found it odd that we did not have a website yet, and with the support of my colleagues (and bosses) I decided to create one.

How It Started

I had a lot of experience tinkering with the Blogger.com templates and the first version of the website was naturally done there at Hospitalists.blogspot.com.

The IT and marketing departments reviewed our provisional website on blogspot.com, they liked it, and gave a green light to relocate it to the Cleveland Clinic servers.

Launching the New Website

Our brand new official website is at: ClevelandClinic.org/Hospitalist

Now you can see the people who work in the section, including their CVs and publications. We modeled this part after the UCSF hospitalist website.

Also, we have listed the main areas where we work: the huge main campus with 1,000 beds, the outpatient preoperative center with 15,000 patient visits per year and the subacute rehabilitation center.

There are also links to our hospitalist fellowship program and the research projects currently underway at the section. As academic hospitalists, we have several projects in different stages at any time.

This is by no means the complete version of the website, it is and will continue to be a work in progress. Our goal is to have it constantly updated to keep pace with the persistent stream of new developments at the Cleveland Clinic. Your input and comments are highly appreciated, please send feedback to clinicalcases@gmail.com.

Things I Learned

I learned several things during my work on the websites for the Section of Hospital Medicine at the Clinic:

1. If you want to start a web project, go ahead and give it a try instead of waiting for somebody else to do it for you.

2. Start your website on Blogger.com. It is much better to show a complete version of the website (although temporary) to the decision makers, so that they can visualize it, rather than to have just a project on paper.

3. Relocating your website from Blogger.com to its permanent place on the company/hospital servers is relatively easy.

4. As I have written before, Blogger.com can be used for much more than blogging. Both your practice, and you personally, should have websites. In a society that sees the world more and more through "Google eyes", if something is not on the web, it does not exist.

The purpose of this post is not only to showcase our new website but also to encourage you to start your own, if you have such plans. After all, if I did it, you can too.

References:
How Can a Doctor Use Google Page Creator?
Image source: Cleveland Clinic

Thanks to John Sharp and his colleagues at the IT and marketing departments of the Cleveland Clinic for all the support.