In Part 1 of this series, we explored why hospital websites have become a critical patient touchpoint, and why the gap between how health systems organize their digital experiences and how patients actually navigate them can erode trust.
That gap comes down to a fundamental mismatch in language and logic. Healthcare organizations structure websites around internal categories: departments, specialties, service lines. However, patients arrive with symptoms, concerns, and questions more akin to...
When the website doesn't speak their language, patients don't dig deeper ... They leave. Identifying that disconnect is the first step. The harder question is: how do you actually understand what's happening on your website, and what to do about it?
Most health systems try to fix this internally by auditing content, benchmarking competitors, or relying on stakeholder intuition. These have value, but they reflect how the organization sees the website, instead of how patients experience it. Closing that gap requires research built around real patient behavior. Here are three methods that get you there.
The most direct way to understand your website's friction is to watch real patients use it.
In moderated screen-share sessions, participants are given realistic tasks like “find a specialist for lower back pain,” or “locate prep instructions for a procedure,” and asked to complete them while thinking out loud. Researchers observe where users hesitate, where they click instinctively, and where they give up entirely.
Findings from these sessions often surprise healthcare teams. Navigation that feels intuitive internally can actually be confusing to patients. As noted before, search terms patients use rarely match the clinical language the site is built around. Sometimes, features patients want most, such as a plain-language cost estimator or a simple "what to expect" guide, are frequently missing altogether.
Observed usability testing doesn't just identify that a problem exists: It shows exactly where and why the experience breaks down, and how that’s impacting the patient journey.
Clicks and web traffic analysis tell you what patients do. In-depth interviews (IDIs) tell you why.
One-on-one qualitative conversations allow researchers to explore the full context behind how a patient approaches a healthcare decision online. Moderators listen as patients walk through actual recent experiences, moments of confusion, and choices around seeking care, probing deeper to get a holistic understanding of the context.
In healthcare, these conversations can reveal how the website experience shapes perception of the organization itself. A patient who couldn't find clear information about a specialist's credentials didn't just have a frustrating UX moment; they left questioning the health system's transparency and modernity. A patient who couldn't figure out how to schedule online doesn't just delay care; they may try again at another provider.
IDIs also surface something analytics can never tell you: a patient's internal criteria. What does "finding the right doctor" actually mean to them? At what point does digital friction become a reason to go elsewhere? These conversations help to build a human picture of the patient journey that goes beyond just click data.
Some of the most valuable research questions aren't about what patients have done, but what they would do.
Situational and hypothetical questions are useful in healthcare because real patient decisions can be emotionally charged and infrequent. A participant may not have recently searched for a cardiologist, but given a realistic scenario, they can walk through exactly how they'd approach it, what they'd look for first, what would give them confidence, and what would make them abandon the process.
“Imagine you've just been referred to a specialist you've never seen before. Walk me through how you'd use this website to prepare for that first appointment.”
These scenarios reveal design gaps and help organizations understand the emotional weight patients carry into digital healthcare interactions. Those interactions would then go on to shape every content and navigation decision made by the healthcare organization.
Used together, these methods create a layered picture of the patient's digital experience:
At MDRG, we design and run this kind of research for health systems ready to understand their digital experience from the outside in and move from internal assumptions to real patient evidence. Because the best digital front door isn't the most polished one. It's the one built around how patients actually walk through it.
Himss. (n.d.). Digital patient experience research. HIMSS. https://www.himss.org/resources
Journal of Medical Internet Research. (n.d.). Digital health usability studies. JMIR. https://www.jmir.org/
Kyruus Health. (n.d.). Patient access journey report. Kyruus Health. https://kyruushealth.com/insights/
Pew Research Center. (n.d.). Health information seeking behavior. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/