Links for Healthcare

Patient-facing information

Appointment letters, discharge leaflets, posters in waiting areas and pharmacy labels all carry URLs that people have to type or scan. A short link on your own domain is readable, recognisable and shorter than the path to a page buried three levels down a site.

When guidance is updated, the destination changes and every leaflet already in circulation starts pointing at the current version. That is the difference between correcting information and reprinting it.

• Readable slugs on a domain patients recognise
• Editable destinations when guidance changes
• QR codes for posters, leaflets and labels
• A custom 404 destination for mistyped codes

Access control where it is needed

Not every link is public. Password protection puts a branded gate in front of a destination, expiry closes a link after a date or a number of uses, and encrypted links keep the destination unreadable from our side because it is decrypted in the browser.

Referrer hiding stops a destination from learning which internal page or document a visitor arrived from, which is worth having when the referring page itself is sensitive.

• Password gates on non-public destinations
• Expiry by date, click count or age
• Encrypted destinations decrypted client-side
• Referrer hiding on sensitive shares

Data handling

Analytics can be run with IP addresses hidden or truncated so full addresses are never stored, and retention periods are configurable so click data ages out on a schedule you set rather than one we choose. A data protection agreement is available and everything exports.

Aggregate reporting still works with IP hiding enabled — you keep country-level geography and device breakdowns without retaining identifiers you do not want.

• IP hiding and truncation options
• Configurable retention windows
• DPA available and full export at any time
• Aggregates preserved after raw events age out

Internal communication

Staff intranets produce URLs nobody can dictate over a phone or fit on a printed rota. Short links give internal resources a memorable form, and folders with defaults keep departmental links organised rather than scattered.

Teams and roles separate departments so a link owned by one service cannot be repointed by another, with read-only access for people who only need to see where things go.

• Memorable internal links on an internal-facing domain
• Folders per department with inherited defaults
• Roles from owner through to read-only
• Per-link permissions for links printed on physical material

Understanding reach without tracking people

Link analytics tells you how often a leaflet code was scanned, from roughly where, on what kind of device, and at what times — enough to know whether an information campaign is being used, without needing to identify anyone.

Automated traffic is separated from human traffic, so a link posted publicly is not reported as a wave of engagement when it was only fetched by scanners and previewers.

• Scan and click volume by placement and day
• Device and coarse geography breakdowns
• Bot traffic reported separately
• CSV export for internal reporting

Practical rollout

Existing link libraries import from CSV or XLSX, and there is a dedicated Bitly import for teams consolidating tools. Bulk creation handles the case where every clinic, ward or service needs its own link at once.

The REST API and webhooks are there when links need to be created by a system rather than a person, for example one link per appointment letter batch.

• CSV, XLSX and Bitly import
• Bulk creation per site, service or batch
• REST API and signed webhooks
• Tags and search across a large link library

Questions

Put correctable, controllable links on your patient material.