Medchart moves medical records between the people who hold them and the people who need them. Hospitals, personal injury firms, insurers, patients. It’s a real business solving a real mess, and they’ve been at it long enough to have customers worth filming.
I spent a couple days on their website. Here’s the short version: almost everything wrong with the homepage is already solved somewhere else on the same site.
The position is right there in the headline, and then the next sentence takes it away. The best writing on the site sits on a page hidden under a nav pill. The strongest proof they have is in a video nobody pulled the right quote from. There’s a full trust story written into the homepage and switched off in the code.
Nothing here needs inventing. It needs collecting. And the reason nobody collected it is that the page has never decided who it’s for.
And that’s the teardown. What makes it worth writing up is what’s sitting one click behind it.
Four names, three jobs, two buyers, one linchpin
The headline says: “Transforming medical record access for businesses beyond care.”
There’s a real position in there. This is for businesses outside healthcare that need medical records. Personal injury firms building a case, insurers pricing a claim. That’s the business, and that’s who pays. Their pricing page even explains how.
Great. Got it.
But the sentence directly below that headline adds healthcare providers and patients into the audience of businesses beyond care?
And the cards just a titch down from that say Lawyers, Insurance, Patients.
Three statements, one page, three different answers to who this is for.
What’s happening here?
Those four names in the subhead aren’t four audiences. They’re different relationships to the same product.
Healthcare providers supply it. The records live with them, which is why for them it’s free. Other people are asking, through Medchart, for something that belongs to the patient. It’s a drive-through window. K.
Lawyers and insurers buy it. $32 a request. Fair, because nobody knows how often they’ll need records, so a flat monthly doesn’t make sense. Again, good, following.
But patients?
The patient problem
The one thing a patient actually does here is authorize the release of her own records. But there’s no sentence on the homepage, the patient page or the provider page describing that step. Dig around and you’ll find “explicit patient consent” once, on the About page. That seems like a lot of weight for one sentence on a page nobody visits.
There is a page that treats a patient like a customer. It’s the tobacco settlement page, tucked under a nav pill at the top of the site. It names her problem, tells her what happens after she asks, and gives her a deadline. It’s the best-written page on the site.
So: four audiences, three jobs, two of them paying, and the step that makes the whole thing work gets mentioned once, somewhere else.
I still can’t tell you whether a patient pays anything. The pricing tiers are built on monthly request volume. A woman asking for her own chart doesn’t have a monthly request volume.
I think Medchart set out to solve one specific problem: make health records accessible to the people who need them. Then the audience grew because it had to, and the product evolved to keep up. The sentence didn’t. Every new audience got added to it and nobody was ever removed.
But the headline knew. “Businesses beyond care” is a company trying to say something true and getting talked out of it by its own page.
They filmed it and didn’t use it
Somebody at Medchart went out and filmed their customers. Cameras, interviews, real people on the record. I know from first-hand experience that’s a lot of work, and I want to give it its due before I say anything else.
But look at what made it onto the homepage.
Above the first testimonial, Medchart’s own headline: “It changed the way we run our firm.”
That’s the company reaching for something. Someone there knew the card shouldn’t say “saves time” because that’s a bullshit metric.
Now the quote underneath it, from Shazia Pervez at Preszler Law, about a system that returns records in a timely manner and a team at Medchart that’s always on your side.
Damn.
A system, faster records, helpful people. That’s the review of a good vendor. That’s NOT a firm being run differently.
Together, the two statements don’t pass the sniff test. The client described a reliable service and that’s not the thing that’s changing how her firm runs. And a reader who cocks her head slightly when reading those two lines doesn’t split the difference. She discredits both.
Here’s what sucks: the claim is true.
If you bother hunting, you’ll find the video on their testimonials page and Shazia says it herself. She talks about the communication gaps between the firm and health providers, and says those gaps have closed by something like half.
What if that line had been the card? A named customer in her own words and a substantial number attached. That headline stops being a stretch and starts being a result, and nobody has to write anything new. It’s already filmed. It’s already on their site. It’s just not on the homepage for some reason.
The rest of the testimonials on the homepage have the same shape. A senior technology executive at a major cancer centre. A lawyer. Someone who says the product saves time and has huge potential.
They’re all being generous but saying essentially nothing. They’re answering the question they were asked, which was almost certainly some version of “would you recommend us” or “what do you like best about us?”
But why wasn’t it “what did you stop doing?”
Or “what made you want to start using us and has that changed?”
Or even simpler “what used to happen on a Friday?”
Different question, different quotes, same customers.
Because a hospital’s problem and a personal injury firm’s problem aren’t the same problem, and right now the page puts them shoulder to shoulder, without clearly explaining either, and makes the reader figure it out.
Everything that separates a company from the competition comes out of what its customers say. Medchart has 13 customer names on that page and a small smattering of some footage behind it.
The material is there but it looks like nobody knew what to go looking for, because the page hasn’t decided who it’s talking to.
The newest thing on the homepage
Earlier this month I looked at this homepage. Since then one thing changed. A SOC 2 Type 2 badge appeared in the footer.
Nobody gets a Type 2 for fun. You get one because a deal stalled at a security review. Industry pricing puts a first-year program in the range of $30,000 to $150,000 once you count readiness work, tooling, penetration testing and internal hours, and the observation window means that could take from six to twenty months.
So there’s a buyer attached to that decision. It isn’t the twelve-lawyer personal injury firm. Nobody there is reading an attestation report. It isn’t really the hospital either, because a Canadian privacy office asks about PHIPA and PIPEDA and wants a data sharing agreement.
The buyers who ask for a Type 2 by name are insurance carriers and clinical research sponsors. The math agrees. A law firm at 20 requests a month is $640. One insurance company at 2,000 requests a month is $720,000 a year.
That badge is the clearest statement of strategy on the site. It says the next dollar comes from enterprise. And the badge isn’t a link. “SOC 2” appears zero times in the text of any page. There’s no security page, no trust page, no report to request.
The same thing happened to the rest of the trust story. Encryption details, third-party penetration testing, a named Director of Privacy, a compliance table listing six statutes. All written. But all sitting in blocks that a CSS rule hides. Somebody wrote it, the block got switched off, and nobody went back.
The best page
The tobacco settlement page has the clearest copy on the site.
It talks to the reader directly. It names what she’s trying to do. It tells her what happens after she asks, including the follow-up, which is the one question the homepage leaves hanging. And it draws a line between what the official claims agent handles and what Medchart handles.
Same company, same product, same audiences. Written in a way that speaks to the reader instead of at her.
That’s my whole diagnosis. Medchart can write. Somebody there can write very well. That voice is on a page most visitors will never see, and the homepage lists four different groups with three different needs but only two of them pay.
What I’d do
Pick the person who signs the check and build the page for them.
As it stands, the homepage calls out too many different groups as people who might benefit from the product. But it’s unclear who pays for it and how it actually works for them.
Write the homepage the way they wrote the tobacco page.
Move Shazia’s number to the card.
It’s in the video on the testimonials page. Communication gaps with health providers, closed by roughly half. Pull that sentence (verbatim from the video), put it under the headline that’s already there.
Get more clear on who the best customers are.
The most senior customer quoted on that page runs technology for one of the largest cancer centres in the world, and before that he ran it for UHN in Toronto. The card says “University of Texas.” Plenty of people in Ontario healthtech would recognize that name if the page let them and that adds loads of local authority that’s currently missing.
Clean the rest of the quotes up, then put the testimonials page in the menu.
They’ve got some great clients who are clearly willing to speak about the benefits of the product, so go back to them and ask a different question that speaks to transformation and outcomes, then update that page and make it easy to find.
Fix the plumbing.
The buttons on the homepage need some attention because they don’t all go to where you’d expect them to go to. And the pricing page still can’t tell a patient if or what she pays, which matters because a patient is one of the four audiences on the homepage.
Somebody at this company can write, and somebody went out and filmed customers. Neither of those things shows up on the page that matters most.
That’s it. Not a huge lift. It’s not a rebrand. It’s a company that has all the parts but hasn’t laid them out constructively on the homepage.
