VA MidSouth Healthcare Network
This website was selected as a finalist for the 2008 Web Managers Best Practice Awards. Members of the Web Managers Forum will vote for winners, to be announced at the Government Web Managers conference May 5, 2008, in Washington, DC.
Below is this finalist's nomination form, so Forum members can learn more about the website before they vote.
Describe the top customer task you're nominating:
Obtain health care information and medical center information
URL of the top customer task:
Describe how you identified your top customer task.Our network office in Nashville, TN, and medical centers in Huntington, WV; Lexington and Louisville, KY; and Memphis, Mountain Home, Murfreesboro, and Nashville, TN; each used a nationally developed user–centric prototype Internet site template for its facility website. We modified each VA Medical Center home page to share the same look as the Veterans Health Administration home page. We made additional navigation changes as a result of user testing conducted at the 2007 Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention. In identifying our top customer task, we examined WebTrends reports and search engine statistics to determine customer needs. Each site offers a "Contact the Webmaster" link for customers to provide feedback and suggestions or recommendations for the site. We regularly provide information about our site and solicit veteran input through Veterans Health Watch, our quarterly print publication to veterans. We work closely with our national Office of Web Communications and modify our sites based on their feedback. When they indicated that their search queries showed that prescription information is a top customer task, we immediately placed a prescriptions button on the network site and each medical center home page to assist patients of each medical center in obtaining prescription information.
Describe how you made this task easier to complete.
By using the VA Medical Center prototype site as our starting point, we immediately provided veterans with a task-oriented approach to our site. Each of our medical center websites includes an "I Want To" box. This box contains a number of tasks which veterans want to accomplish through our sites. This "I Want To" box was included as a result of benchmarking private sector health care sites. The items available to veterans in this box are included as a result of feedback received from WebTrends reports, search engine results, and American Customer Satisfaction Index reports, which indicate these top tasks as those our patients want to accomplish when they visit our sites. By using the "I Want To" box, most of our customers are able to obtain the information they want or complete their desired task. Because a number of our customers want to obtain personal health information via their online records, we have created a number of links to our national My HealtheVet portal to assist them in getting this information. The "Contact Us" button in the left navigation of the network site and each medical center site assists veterans with obtaining further information about specific topics.
How do you routinely monitor the success of this task?
Our web site success is monitored by the amount of traffic we receive and the ability of the site to provide needed information to our veterans and visitors. We have recently begun aggressive advertisement of our sites, including the address on letterhead, pamphlets, and brochures, and placing each facility's website address at the entrances to each medical center. Business office staff members in several of our facilities have reported fewer telephone calls, especially at those facilities where the website address is provided as part of the "hold" telephone message. Making this information available online allows our staff to answer fewer phone calls and, instead, focus on providing quality patient care to our veterans. In January 2008, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs announced expanded eligibility for veterans who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Through the use of our Internet site, we were able to immediately notify our veterans of this change. We also used our intranet sites to notify employees of these changes so that newly eligible veterans would not be turned away. In this case, we provided a link on our local sites to the appropriate program office "authoritative source" web page.
Extra Credit: Describe what you've done to improve other critical tasks and promote critical tasks within your agency.
In 2006, our network was cited as one of two in the nation that did not have a consistent Web presence. Only three of our six facilities had an Internet Web presence. Our network office had no presence on the Internet. In less than 2 years, we have become a model for other VA health care networks in the country. Our network Internet site links to each of our facility sites, and each facility site links back to our network site. This helps veterans gain an understanding of our network organization and the services we provide. In 2007, we hired VA's first network Web content manager. He led our public affairs officers and webmasters in developing their local sites and unifying our Web presence. We work closely with the Veterans Health Administration Office of Web Communications to link to authoritative content and are constantly modifying our site to adjust to the needs of our veterans. Two members of our Web team are directly involved with national efforts to improve web services throughout VA.
Page Updated or Reviewed: April 15, 2008
