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 How do you bring geographically distant families of prospective clients and residents into your nursing home? What can you do to recruit the best and brightest to your staff? Can the referral process among healthcare professionals be simplified? Welch Healthcare & Retirement Group - with six nursing and rehabilitation centers, home health and home care services, a retirement community, assisted living residences, subacute care and an educational institute in the Boston (South Shore) area - found a way to answer these questions and more: a World Wide Web site on the Internet. The idea for a web site emerged when we discovered that although virtually every major Boston hospital had a site on the Internet, there was no existing resource at the time linking South Shore elder care services with the rest of the area's online healthcare community. After extensive research and preparation, we launched the web site in November 1995. One thing our research had shown was that some sites on the World Wide Web were difficult to navigate and that gaining access to them was a painfully slow process. We endeavored to design our site to be as user-friendly as possible, with simple but eye-catching graphics, easy-to-find subjects and informative content. We made sure the site would be running on adequate equipment, so that when users reached Welch's Internet "address," the opening page would load (come onto the screen) quickly. Welch Healthcare's web site, which can be accessed via its domain name: http://www.welchhrg.com, has more than 100 pages of information and has become a resource not only for seniors and their families, but for healthcare professionals throughout the South Shore area and beyond. The web site can be reached by anyone with a computer, a web browser (software that connects a computer with the World Wide Web) and Internet access. The site has been recognized as a model for the long-term care profession, receiving a Blue Ribbon Award from the New England Healthcare Assembly (NEHA), a long-term care provider organization and New England's largest healthcare-related professional organization, for innovation and community programming. The following are our answers to questions that are commonly asked about any new web site— for example: |
