Help Dorsata with a new website design

Dorsata

We provide a web platform for physicians to collaboratively develop, enhance, and share clinical algorithms. The primary users of our site are physicians and paraprofessionals (nurses, PAs, etc.)

http://www.dorsata.com

As you can see from the website currently (dorsata.com) we have employed a faded blue as our primary color. The background of the site is a light gray, but we are open to new suggestions for the background. We are big fans of minimalist designs. Our user base is used to a number of authoritative sources on the web for clinical content (New England Journal of Medicine, PubMed, etc.). We want our site to be professional and NON-consumer (consumer being LivingSocial, Groupon, Airbnb etc.), however we're not opposed to some subtle uses of consumer type styles to prevent the site from being boring. Text should be easy to ready and look professional. OpenSans is currently the predominant font on the site.

For our landing page we would like to accomplish three primary objectives:

1) Feature the clinical search functionality of our site through placement and a brief description.
2) Provide marketing information pertaining to the core features of the site, utilizing some form of a scroller to cycle through three or four sections of content.
3) A scroller or strip for our partner companies and organizations.
4) Feature a signup link and statement about why the user should signup.

For #1:
Search will eventually be a very critical feature of our site. Therefore, we would like to begin by featuring it prominently in the page. We offer the ability to search through several categories of content so we'll need some sort of drop down or control for that in the search bar. We've seen a category selection dropdown integrated into the actual field input. We'd like to see that in our design. Also, we'd like to have some form of a description label integrated into the design so that users will know what they can expect from the search tool.

For #2:
First, we'd like to have a place where we can summarize the application's value to healthcare. This first part of the second section would be high level information. We have several user types that can draw value from the site. We'd like to have the ability to discuss the value for each of these users after the summary section. Accompanying each type, we'd like to have an image.

For #3:
Highlighting our partnerships is going to be a critical feature of the landing page. This is paramount to securing buy-in from physicians as they are very pack oriented. Social proof is very important.

For #4:
Above all else, we want to drive user-signups with this landing page. Currently, there are sign-in and sign-up links in the header. We're open to any placement on the page itself, but believe it does need to flow logically from the marketing content and be accompanied by some kind of statement that ties everything together.

Using Lorem ipsum is more than fine, but please provide font and character guidelines for all text.

We are fine with the implementation of icons into the design, but these icons should carry the same professional feel as the rest of the page. We do not want cartoon type icons or the like. We believe that tasteful use of professional icons, images, and color will provide an interesting and attractive look to our users but want to avoid looking playful or not serious. Our tool is being used by doctors to help treat patients and we want to make sure that it comes across that we take this seriously. We are also hesitant to incorporate much stock art - for any images on the site, perhaps some dressed up screenshots would be more appropriate.