Nebraska Methodist Health System

The number of visits to the typical healthcare website has doubled over the past two years, and that trend looks to be here to stay. Healthcare systems are increasingly focusing resources on helping patients quickly and easily find the care they need. 

A key challenge is the duplication of effort and information across multiple legacy hospital and clinic sites, which isn’t just confusing for patients - it creates headaches for marketing and IT teams. As health systems work to control costs, streamlining content and platforms is a win-win for health systems and patients. 

NMHS’s core digital presence was sprawled across over 12+ websites all built on an outdated, proprietary CMS. The NMHS team wanted to consolidate their digital properties into a single streamlined platform while creating a new, intuitive customer journey through the site.

NMHS partnered with Palantir to build a secure, scalable, and open source platform in Drupal 9. Our visual designers created a modern, fresh look and feel and our strategists developed and user-tested a unified information architecture and menu. We integrated the Kyruus provider directory, and built out a new calendar system for events and classes.

Streamlined content

The goal for any website is to have the least amount of content possible to do the job. Our content inventory found that of the 5,094 pages across Methodist’s domains:

• 62% were migratable as-is (news, articles, bios) 
• 30% were database driven (physician profiles, locations, and providers)
• 7% was unstructured, narrative content that needed to be audited for quality, SEO optimization, and voice (Service lines, landing pages, patient services)

We focused the revision and optimization efforts on the 7% of narrative content. The first challenge was to plan for the duplicates. Each of the four hospitals had separate service line information. As our client lead put it: “Let’s take obstetric services. Looking at the various sites, there are 20-25 pages out there that have the same information. Where do you even start to update?”

We supported the NMHS content creation team by establishing templates for service line pages and a timeline for creation and review. Despite the challenges of the pandemic, the new NMHS site launched with streamlined, consolidated and modernized service line user flows. 

Scalable, open source platform

As an open source and extensible platform, there’s nothing that Drupal can’t integrate with. The new NMHS site is built in Drupal 9, and is currently integrated with Kyruus for the provider directory. The new visual design of the site is captured in a design system that provides the NMHS marketing team with a “Lego set” of components that can be used to create new pages and user flows as new needs arise. 

The next phase of the project is to build out five additional sites to complete the consolidation of the NMHS digital presence. Each of those new sites will inherit the content management system, information architecture, and the design system of the current Bestcare.org. As a result, spinning up and customizing new sites will take a fraction of the time and cost. 

KPI dashboards

One of the key challenges of the original NMHS platform was that each hospital, location, and service had its own separate website. As a result, user journeys were so fragmented that it was difficult to get any actionable insights from their analytics. The new consolidated platform solves the structural challenge by creating a unified experience. Our strategists implemented Google Tag Manager to capture conversions and events across the key conversions of the site. We also developed a set of Google Data Studio dashboards to make it easier to track trends on key conversions like click-to-call.
 

Visitors to the new site can quickly and easily find information and book appointments at all locations and services without having to navigate through a dozen sites. Consolidating the core sites has also cut the amount of pages the content team has to write and the marketing team has to maintain by about 75%.  And the new look and feel is a hit with stakeholders and patients alike.