Clean and Simple Approach Makes Lab Tests Online “Outstanding”

It is a site that is antithetical to so many popular conceptions of what makes a good web site:  It contains no multimedia, very few graphics, and is often quite text heavy.  It uses big words and technical jargon. And perhaps the biggest sin of all is that the news section on the home page is typically updated once, maybe twice, a month with just one news article. 

Such is Lab Tests Online (www.labtestsonline.org), a winner this year of the WMA’s Outstanding Web Site award.  As the site’s executive producer, chief architect, and editorial director, George Linzer is particularly pleased that this simple, very un-flashy site should be recognized for doing its job well.  On the flip side of those “negatives” cited above: the text is very accessible to the lay reader, and provides users with the vocabulary they need to talk more productively with their doctors. As for those unfamiliar terms, they are either defined in context or linked to glossary definitions. And while there may be little news in the medical laboratory field that has high relevance for consumers, the site is regularly adding new test and condition descriptions and updating existing pages.

Lab Tests Online is a non-commercial patient education web site, providing authoritative information on a broad range of laboratory tests and related topics.  Content on the site is the product of a collaboration among 17 professional organizations representing the laboratory community.  In developing the site, the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC), the producer of Lab Tests Online, had one goal: to serve users with the kind of information they need to answer questions about their lab tests. 

“Because the site deals with healthcare-related topics,” explained Linzer, “we understand that many of our users are likely to be under some level of emotional stress, and so we sought to simplify as much as possible the process of finding and understanding the information. If we can help alleviate rather than add to their stress, then we are doing our job successfully.”  With monthly traffic approaching 800,000 visitors, the site appears to be reaping the benefits of many satisfied customers who not only return to the site, but who also recommend it to others.  An online survey suggests that 86% of users would refer others to the site.

3 menus and a Search field at the top of each page make navigation a breeze

Test descriptions are organized to make it easy for the user
to zero in on the desired information

Lab Tests Online’s status as a not-for-profit, niche-oriented site driven solely by a mandate to educate patients and their caregivers has contributed to a freedom to stay focused. The editorial team is free from constraints to maximize page views, retain eyeballs, and emphasize the Lab Tests Online brand above all others.  Instead, the goal is to deliver the one page that gives the user exactly the information she is looking for, as fast as possible.  According to Linzer, this is how the site defines success. 

As part of their effort to get users to where they want to go, marketing efforts encourage other web sites to link to any page on Lab Tests Online – provided the page appears in its own unique browser window without other branding – and, likewise, the site offers hundreds of deep links to other web sites that provide contextually relevant supplementary information.

Such single-minded emphasis on content could not pay off without a significant effort by a number of people: 

Ø      an associate editor who coordinates the development of pages and manually manages the highly interlinked page structure;

Ø      several freelance writers who understand how to plug each new article into that interlinked structure with sufficient depth for the site’s users; and

Ø      a growing team of volunteer laboratory professionals, including a number of Ph.D.s and M.D.s, to serve as the site’s Editorial Review Board.  All content on the site is passed by the Board, which includes representatives from each of the 17 organizations supporting the site.  The board members bring a wide range of expertise to the editorial process – their own and that of their colleagues – and, as importantly, a passion for communicating with patients about laboratory testing.

Behind the scenes, a team of people helps keep the site up and running.  Part of Linzer’s mandate when asked to launch the site in 2001 was to keep the site infrastructure-lite.  So, site hosting has been outsourced to Rackspace, a managed hosting company that boasts the motto, “Fanatical support”, and lives up to it – the site has experienced just one hour of downtime in four-and-a-half years, downtime that was not attributable to Rackspace.  Similarly, to manage the anticipated high volume of pages, AACC licensed a content management system from an application service provider, going with Atomz Corporation’s Publish, and benefiting from fully responsive and knowledgeable technical support at all levels of the company.

Today, the site is the Internet’s premiere source for patient information on laboratory testing, and is one of the more respected health sites on the Internet.  As such, it has had the added benefits of highlighting the importance of the medical laboratory and helping to increase the visibility of the laboratory profession.  The profession has welcomed this new opportunity to raise its profile as it has struggled in recent years with worker shortages and suffered from adverse policy decisions. 

Financed in the US by more than 40 diagnostic companies, Lab Tests Online has also attracted interest from professional societies abroad.  A localized version of the site was launched in the United Kingdom in 2004 with the support of the Ministry of Health, and translations are being prepared in Germany, Italy, and Spain by local professional societies with support from a European trade association.