“Print is boring,” says family physician Steve Samudrala in Brentwood, Tenn. “Look how many e-mails go unread.”

So when the swine-flu pandemic reared its snout this spring, Samudrala sent an e-mail newsletter to his patients with a link to a video of himself and an actress discussing the disease’s symptoms and treatment. When patients clicked on the link, they were transported to Samudrala’s Web site (www.afdclinics.com), where cut-out video images of a physician and an actress appeared on the screen and started talking, like little people who lived inside the monitor.

Practice Web sites have come a long way from the days when they functioned merely as electronic Yellow Page ads: colorful but static. Now they’re busy, interactive cyber offices where all sorts of valuable work gets done: patient education, appointment scheduling, collections, and online visits, to name a few examples. Increasingly, they give patients a convenient view into their electronic health record. And the best Web sites cater to the online preferences of patients, whether it’s feeding them videos or connecting to social networking platforms like Facebook.

Has your Web site kept pace with the state of the art? If not, there are ways to upgrade your site, some of which involve little or no expense. What you’ll get is the practice-management equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife.

Widgets — good things in small packages

If your Web site is your online office, then a widget is the equivalent of a flat-screen TV in the waiting room. Also known as gadgets, widgets are small, self-contained windows of information — ranging from news headlines to video — that you can plug into your Web site with just a few clicks. They’re the easiest way to take your Web site to a higher level, and they’re usually free.

This technology gave practices like Dalton (Ga.) Family Practice a quick and easy way to educate patients about the swine flu earlier this year. The practice embedded in its Web site (www.daltonfamilypractice.com) a free swine-flu widget created by the U.S. Centers for Disease and Control. By clicking on topics in the widget, visitors are directed straight to the latest CDC guidance on the subject. You can find this and 14 other public-health widgets at the agency’s Web site (www.cdc.gov/widgets).

If you want to help patients take responsibility for their health, widgets fill the bill. Patients can learn how to conduct skin self-exams with a free widget from a Web site called VisualDxHealth (www.visualdxhealth.com), which offers six other devices. Another widget from Google lets them calculate their body mass index. The search-engine colossus maintains a warehouse of almost 200,000 free widgets (www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets) that you can search for using key words. If you’re looking for news feeds on healthcare in general or a particular topic like diabetes, Google, and another prime source of widgets called Widgetbox, (www.widgetbox.com) give you plenty of choices.

Videos appeal to visual learners

For Samudrala, online videos market his practice as well as educate his patients. Samudrala operates three urgent-care clinics, but like many other physicians in this niche, he hopes to convert stray walk-ins into regular patients. So when a new patient comes in with a bee sting or sprained ankle, the patient is asked to provide his e-mail address in the registration process. That patient then goes on the mailing list for a weekly e-newsletter that advertises a new health video. “We’re hoping that the videos will make them think of us when they need a doctor again,” says Samudrala.

The prospect of offering 52 videos a year on your Web site may sound daunting, but about 15 percent are freebies available via hyperlink from FamilyDoctor.org, created by the American Academy of Family Physicians. Samudrala’s remaining videos, produced by an Internet marketing company called DefiNet Contact, feature Samudrala talking to another physician, a medical assistant, or an actor about a condition. They’re superimposed on the content of the Web site home page with a technique called borderless video. Because the clips are only a few minutes long, four to six can be shot in one monthly, hour-long session, he says. All the videos are archived at Samudrala’s Web site. He pays the marketing company roughly $1,000 a month to produce the borderless videos and send out the weekly e-newsletters. A single borderless video, minus any e-newsletter, would cost between $500 and $600, according to Scott Farrell, vice president of operations at DefiNet Contact.

New York reproductive endocrinologist and OB/GYN Alan Copperman also has caught the video bug. But unlike Samudrala, he produces his own footage in-house with the help of two tech-savvy employees at his clinic, Reproductive Medical Associates of New York (www.rmany.com). So far, Copperman has posted two videos on his Web site. One takes visitors on a tour of his facility and reviews in vitro fertilization step by step, all with the hope of making would-be patients a little less nervous, he says. “Patients want reassurance that their sperm and eggs won’t get mixed up with somebody else’s,” he says. The other video explains the process of freezing fertilized eggs.

Like Samudrala, Copperman says it’s important to reach out to patients who are more inclined to watch a video than plow through text. “Some people are visual learners,” he says. One example was a woman who had just been told she needed in vitro fertilization to become pregnant. Googling for guidance, she found Copperman’s video reviewing the procedure. She made an appointment with Copperman, received a real-life tour of the facility, and began the treatment.

“She had been afraid of in vitro fertilization, but the video demystified it and calmed her down,” says Copperman. “I don’t think she would have responded the same way if she had just read about it.”

MacArthur OB/Gyn (www.macarthurobGyn.com) in Irving, Texas, plans to produce a library of video health messages from its five physicians with a special mission in mind: explain lab results that patients access on the practice’s Web site through password-protected secure messaging. “If a patient finds out she’s anemic, she can look at the video on anemia,” says OB/GYN Jeff Livingston. “Eventually, we’d like to include a link to the video in the secure message containing the test results.”