June 20, 2011

Contact:
Jason Merrill
314-286-0302
[email protected]

ST. LOUIS - To meet the growing demands of smartphone users, Barnes-Jewish Hospital’s new mobile site, m.barnesjewish.org, allows patients and visitors the opportunity to easily find a wide range of useful information from the palm of their hand.

According to Google Analytics for www.barnesjewish.org – the hospital’s traditional website -- visits, unique visitors, and pageviews from mobile devices have all increased an average of 11% per month for the past 12 months.

“To put that in perspective, in May 2011 we had more traffic from mobile devices than we did in the first two quarters of 2010,” says Joe Ebeling, web center team lead at Barnes-Jewish.

For the estimated 45 million smartphone users in the United States, navigating the full Barnes-Jewish Hospital website was not optimal. While the site could be viewed on most mobile devices prior, the full website wasn’t necessarily designed for the smaller screens found on smartphones.

“The full website has larger pages that require mobile visitors to scroll up and down and left and right, and they also take longer to load,” says Ebeling. “With the mobile site, pages load faster, text is easier to read, and features are easier to use.”

The mobile site allows patients to easily find a doctor, get directions and obtain contact numbers for hospital departments.

It’s another expansion of the web for Barnes-Jewish. The Barnes-Jewish Hospital website was relaunched to accolades in 2009 as winner of numerous awards, including gold for Best Overall Web Site at the 14th Annual Healthcare Internet Conference.

Also in the works at Barnes-Jewish is a mobile application, slated for release early next year, which users will be able to download and run on smartphones and other mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad and Android.