The UAB Health System Web site has been re-launched with both a fresh new look and a new Web address – www.uabhealth.org.
New features of the site – which provides more than 15,000 pages of information on disease topics, UAB facilities, services and physicians – include videos, interactive animations, a new physician directory and enhanced search capabilities.
Web sites for each of the UABHS member facilities also sport the new look and easy to remember addresses: UAB Hospital, www.uabhospital.org; The Kirklin Clinic, www.kirklinclinic.org: UAB Highlands, www.uabhighlands.org; Callahan Eye Foundation Hospital, www.callahaneyehospital.org; and Spain Rehab, www.spainrehab.org.
In addition, there’s easy access to UAB Health System available jobs at www.uabhealthcareers.org, and the UAB Online Physician Resource Center for referring physicians is located at www.uabhealth.org/4docs .
The Health System site, which was originally created in 1995, has undergone three major revisions since its inception. “The site has grown dramatically,” says Susan Reid, Health System Internet Marketing Manager since 2000. Reid has overseen two of the three revisions of the site.
“We have redesigned our site with the visitor in mind,” Reid says. “The home page fills the screen, making more of the information visible without having to scroll down. It has a cleaner, more attractive look with less copy and more links to take visitors directly to their desired destination.
“With the site’s new features, we expect the number of visitors to increase even more.”
In 1999, the site had fewer than 100,000 visitors, a number that grew to more than 2 million in 2005. The number of visitors projected for 2006 is 3.3 million.
“Our goal is to be the resource for reliable health information and UAB Health System services,” says Debbie Hunter-Snow, director of UAB Health System Marketing Communications. “We are particularly proud of our extensive video library available for RSS download. Our strategy is to eventually make all of our health information content available on the Web in a video streaming format.”
The UAB Health System is not new to the Internet; it has been consistently listed as one of “Healthcare’s 100 Most Wired Hospitals” by Hospitals and Health Networks, the journal of the American Hospital Association. When it launched its first site in1995, the Health System was a pioneer in building health-care Web sites, and over the years it has earned numerous awards, most recently winning a 2005 World Wide Web Silver Award and a 2005 Alabama Healthcare Public Relations & Marketing Society Gold Award.
The site is powered by a content management system called Estrada® that allows anyone with a password to enter information to the site without requiring knowledge of a particular programming language such as HTML. This allows individual departments to maintain their own sections of the site. Anyone within a UAB Health System department wishing to add such a section to the site should contact Reid at sreid@uabmc.edu .