If your business involves protected health information (PHI), security simply has to come first.
For healthcare providers, that means building a website that meets HIPAA’s requirements to safeguard sensitive data while still feeling comfortable and welcoming to the people using it. When Rinnah MacVittie approached Hop Studios to design and build a website for her new practice, Selective Psychiatry, we knew HIPAA compliance, security, and patient trust had to be built in from day one.
A quick sidenote here: while this blog post is about compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the concepts are generally applicable to other medical / health privacy laws, such as:
- California’s CMIA - Confidentiality of Medical Information Act & PAHRA - Patient Access to Health Records Act
- Canada’s PIPEDA - Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act
- Ontario’s PHIPA - Personal Health Information Protection Act
- British Columbia’s PIPA - Personal Information Protection Act
Rinnah came in with a clear vision for the practice and the patients she wanted to reach. A big part of that was getting very personal, very quickly, in order to filter and pre-qualify potential clients. She needed a secure, HIPAA-compliant consultation form-slash-questionaire designed to elicit and protect sensitive client information. We recommended Wix as her content management system for its flexible design options and cost efficiency, and because, with the right configuration (and the right starting templates), it can support a HIPAA-compliant setup.
That configuration matters as much as the platform itself. Wix will put a signed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) in place, and once the right settings are applied, Selective Psychiatry’s site meets HIPAA requirements while staying fully responsive across desktop and mobile. We also used Wix’s tools to verify SEO best practices across the site to help reach people actively searching for personalized psychiatric care.
The “West Elm”-ish design itself came out of close collaboration with Rinnah, who from the very start had a strong vision of what she wanted her site to express. We helped nurture that vision and grow it using Wix’s immense but confusing template library and page-building blocks, resulting in a fully formed, decluttered, upscale mental health practice that shows her warm, professional persona and style.
Visitors are directed and encouraged throughout the site to submit a consultation request through a secure and very sophisticated qualification form. With conditional logic and wise flow decisions, the form ensures that Rinnah’s time is spent on folks who really can benefit from her skills and training, and it also plants the idea that she’s a sophisticated, technically savvy practitioner, which is a good match for the ideal clients she’s seeking. With Wix’s complex, highly scriptable tools, plus a training session from our team, Rinnah can now manage leads and update the site herself going forward.
If you’re a healthcare provider looking to build a modern, secure, HIPAA-compliant website, we’d love to help. Send us a message to get started.
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