Experienced offliners only!

They are a "sister hospital" the main hospital does have their own website. It's horrid but they do have an on staff team for updates/maintenance.

Problem is, their networking team is an absolute joke. For me to "middle-man" this project would be a nightmare. They have already spoke about a separate website on the same server and it was denied. See, the larger hospital conquers the market here since they are the only one. Thus, they lack the marketing attention. It's a fairly long story...

Conclusion is, If I could find a self hosted solution, it would make this much easier. They really lack in the IT / networking department.

I'm going to take an estimate that the mid/end result of the website will consist of 500-1k pages/posts of content. It will also use other applications like patient portals, EMR's etc...

It's hard for me to give you an exact answer at this time. It was my first meeting with the board. It will be built over time and not all at once (obviously) I do know that they will be dedicating staff to this website for content purposes.

EDIT: To answer your question about "what needs to be secure". I'm just concerned about the overall protection of the website. With HIPPA policies, and other confidentiality compliance laws, it's imperative that this thing is a tank..the last thing I want is to be held responsible for some type of breech. (a contract will be put into place for this)

I had a company in the medical field (not a hospital but bigger in territory as well as multiple offices) also interested in something a little more complex than what you're stating. It involved a lot of personal records and information being stored online and of course a lot of other stuff. I didn't end up taking the client by the way because the project at the end was too complex in scope and too time consuming for me to take on.

You have to do a lot of research on HIPAA compliance. You need to have servers in secured facilities running the site, SSL certificates for certain areas, etc... I did the research and the project I was going to do was just much bigger than what I wanted to deal with.

A hospital as long as it's no recording keeping online or showing any personal information probably wouldn't be too hard, but it really depends on what they need.

The business I turned down, I went as far as quoting a price, them agreeing and I backed out literally a couple of hours after a verbal agreement because I realized how much of a pain the job was going to be. I told them after further review and analysis I'm just not comfortable with the project and didn't want to do anything to jeopardize their business.

The good news about this is I have a great relationship with that business because I did turn them down. They found a developer or company willing to take their project. They got outside financing to get this done since they didn't want to use their own cash. The deal was $50K+ to build the site plus hosting fees. It's been over a year and the site is not complete yet. They want to kill the developers and always tell me they wish I would have taken the project on.

Moral of the story: Make sure you're comfortable with the work. You can outsource all of the work, but you have to make sure you outsource it to the right people and when it comes to compliance check with a lawyer and do a lot of research before quoting a price (there may be dedicated server and monthly fees involved).

Yeah, though this thread is a year old...We ended up just referring them to a company that handles medical websites for hospitals, doctors, and treatment centers. After debate, my company was just not ready for that large of a project.

We made a hefty chunk from the referral sale and continue to make out well by having them as a client for other avenues.

We handle all other online advertising and have had some great success with them.

Best of luck to you.