What features should a CMS have to cater to the healthcare sector?

A CMS designed for the healthcare sector must have a number of key features to support the unique needs of content-proficient healthcare organizations.

Chief among these requirements is the need for a highly structured content model in order to enhance quality and make content reusable across multiple applications.

With this in mind, here are essential features your future content management system should have in order to support your healthcare organization.

Standardization

Healthcare organizations deal with a vast amount of medical terminology and documentation. To ensure consistency and accuracy, structured content must follow established medical standards and best practices.

Structured content offers several benefits for organizations with large amounts of digital assets. First, it allows for better content management, as content can be organized and stored in a way that is easily searchable and retrievable. This results in improved efficiency and productivity as medical professionals can quickly find the content they need.

Second, structured content can be repurposed and reused across multiple platforms, reducing the need to create new content and saving time and resources. Finally, structured content ensures consistency and accuracy across all digital assets, enhancing the brand image and improving user experience.

In line with the ideas behind structured content, a proper CMS should be able to integrate with standardized medical taxonomy systems such as SNOMED CT to ensure that classifications and medical terminology is both correct and consistent across all documentation and data points.

By standardizing structured content, the CMS can help ensure that healthcare professionals and patients have accurate and consistent information, leading to better patient care. Additionally, a CMS can enforce rules and guidelines for the creation and management of content to maintain consistency, accuracy, and compliance with regulations.

Search and indexing

Structured content in healthcare must be indexed in a way that is consistent and easily searchable. This is essential to ensure that healthcare professionals can quickly and easily get the information they need to provide the best possible care.

Thus, a CMS should provide standardized metadata fields and integrate with taxonomies like SNOMED CT that help categorize content in a consistent way, making it easier to reuse, search and find information quickly.

Additionally, a CMS can use intelligent search algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to improve the accuracy and speed of search results.

Read more: How to leverage structured content for health organizations »

Interoperability

Healthcare organizations often use multiple systems and applications to manage medical data. Structured content must be designed with interoperability in mind, allowing it to be seamlessly integrated across multiple systems, thereby improving collaboration and enabling better health professional experience and patient care.

Your future CMS should support open standards and protocols, as well as provide integrations and APIs that allow content to be shared and exchanged between multiple systems and applications.

Additionally, a CMS can support the use of industry-standard formats and protocols, such as SNOMED CT, making it easier to share and exchange medical data across different systems.

Customization and flexibility

Structured content in healthcare must be flexible and adaptable to changing needs, requiring a modular content management approach for easy updates and modifications.

A CMS for healthcare should offer customization options to support different use cases, enabling healthcare organizations to efficiently manage content in a rapidly changing industry.

A CMS can provide a modular and extensible architecture that allows for easy updates and modifications. Additionally, a CMS can provide customization options for the user interface, metadata, and content structure, enabling healthcare organizations to tailor the CMS to their specific requirements.

Collaboration and teamwork

Your chosen content management system should enable collaboration and teamwork by providing features and tools that enable multiple users to access, edit, and share content as needed.

The CMS can for instance provide a robust user management system that allows healthcare organizations to define user roles, access levels, and permissions for different types of users. Additionally, a CMS can provide collaboration tools such as version control and commenting, allowing multiple users to work on the same content simultaneously while maintaining version control and avoiding conflicts.

By providing collaboration and teamwork features, a CMS can improve communication and efficiency among editors, enabling them to work together to provide better content for healthcare professionals.

See also: Why choose Enonic's headless CMS when building a Next.js website »

User-friendly interface

Any CMS should provide a customizable dashboard that enables users to quickly access the features and tools they need, reducing the time and effort required to navigate the system.

Additionally, a CMS tailored for the content-proficient healthcare industry should provide features such as drag-and-drop file upload, easy-to-use search functionality, and clear labeling, making it easy for content editors, as well as healthcare staff to manage information efficiently.

By providing a user-friendly interface, a CMS can help minimize training time, reduce user error, and improve information management efficiency in the healthcare industry.

Multimedia support

A modern and future-proof CMS should of course support multimedia for the healthcare sector, by providing tools and features that enable the management and display of any multimedia content.

The CMS can provide a media library that allows healthcare organizations to easily upload, store, and manage multimedia files such as videos and images. Additionally, a CMS can provide multimedia support for content display, allowing healthcare organizations to embed multimedia content into structured content, web pages, patient portals, and other online resources.

By providing multimedia support, a CMS can help healthcare organizations effectively inform health professionals and educate patients, as well as promote health awareness, enhancing patient engagement, and improving overall health outcomes.

Accessibility and search engine optimization

Any modern content management system fully supports search engine optimization (SEO) support for the healthcare sector, by providing features that enable healthcare organizations to optimize their content primarily for accessibility, and secondarily for search engine rankings.

Your CMS should provide customizable titles and metadata that enable healthcare organizations to include relevant keywords and descriptions, improving the visibility of their website in disability tools and search engine results.

Also, a CMS can provide features that enable healthcare organizations to optimize their website for mobile devices, improve page load times, and ensure that content is accessible and easy to navigate for everyone.

Don’t forget: Composable architecture: The CMS as your digital experience orchestrator »

Security and privacy

All healthcare actors must protect the integrity of medical information, like symptoms, diagnoses, and suggested treatments. Any serious CMS therefore protects data by preventing unauthorized access and enabling audit trailing.

Additionally, such a CMS can provide access controls and permissions that enable healthcare organizations to define user roles and access levels, ensuring that only authorized personnel have access to sensitive data. A CMS can also provide audit trails and logging features that track user activity and help identify potential security breaches.

By providing security and privacy features, a CMS can help healthcare organizations comply with industry regulations and best practices, protect data integrity, and prevent security breaches that can lead to reputational damage and legal liability.

Compliance with regulations

Healthcare organizations are required to constantly provide up-to-date and compliant medical information, and therefore to keep track of content versions and publish dates, in addition to editorial flow and approval.

Your chosen CMS can for instance provide reporting and monitoring features that enable healthcare organizations to track and report on compliance-related activities, ensuring that they are meeting regulatory requirements. Preferably, the vendor should also be e.g. ISO certified in security and compliance.

By providing compliance features, a CMS can help healthcare organizations avoid legal penalties, protect patient privacy, and maintain the trust of patients and stakeholders.

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To support the unique needs of content-proficient healthcare organizations, a CMS designed for the healthcare sector should include a number of key features.

These include highly structured content models, standardization, search and indexing, interoperability, customization and flexibility, collaboration and teamwork, a user-friendly interface, multimedia support, accessibility and search engine optimization, security and privacy, and compliance with regulations.

A CMS that includes these features can help healthcare organizations manage and distribute their content more efficiently, while ensuring compliance with industry standards and best practices, protecting data integrity, and improving health professional workflows.