In fact, Deloitte’s “2024 Outlook for Health Care Planning for the Future of Health: Top Trends for 2024” predicted that “adopting new technologies and business models — while under sustained financial pressure” would be the biggest challenge facing healthcare executives this year.

To bridge the digital divide while meeting the growing need for patient health information as an integral part of their care and treatment journey, Deloitte Insights recommends healthcare organizations strive for a “digitally enabled, always-on care and well-being approach.” According to an April 2024 Cureus Journal of Medical Science article, hospitals and health systems can move toward this “ideal digital state” in a variety of ways that include:

Source: Navigating the Digital Landscape: Embracing Innovation, Addressing Challenges, and Prioritizing Patient-Centric Care

Never has this been more apparent in our work as a digital agency partner to hospitals, health systems, and healthcare-adjacent organizations. Over many years and many projects, we’ve helped clients gain a stronger footing in this ever-changing playing field by consolidating, streamlining, and optimizing their web infrastructure, content practices, and overall digital footprint, which sometimes spans hundreds of web properties and related applications.

Case in Point: Cooper Health System

In 2023, we partnered with Cooper, one of the leading health systems in the Philadelphia/Southern New Jersey region, on a website redesign and redevelopment project for their two main websites: cooperhealth.org and cooperhealth.edu. The project had an added layer of complexity in that it had to reflect Cooper’s recent merger with Cape Regional Health System.

We needed to ensure the overarching site framework accurately and logically positioned an array of different content types for key audiences that include existing and potential patients, the general public, clinicians, referring physicians, prospective residents, fellows, employees, donors, and more:

Working within an ambitious timeline, we accomplished all of the following tasks:

A Look at Our Process

As you can imagine, executing digital projects of this scale is a huge lift that involves significant time, resources, and multidisciplinary team commitment to be successful. Here, we’ve distilled this complex process into 5 main phases with key takeaways and recommendations gained from our experiences.

1. Build Collaboration & Consensus

We often find that healthcare clients need a website consolidation when numerous individual sites have been deployed across their ecosystem, creating inefficient and inconsistent resourcing, strategy, and execution. But moving away from autonomous web strategies managed by individual departments is a significant shift that may not be immediately embraced.

It’s important to listen to concerns, be prepared to address them, and also make organization-wide decisions that may not align with each individual department’s preferences. Some tools and tactics for success:

• Come prepared with data that demonstrates the challenges of your current fractured digital landscape. Review any inefficiencies in staffing, technical costs, or end-user experience.
• Use surveys, breakout sessions, and 1:1 interviews to understand each department’s unique needs. Involve department leads and content owners as early as possible, and make sure their role in decision-making is clearly understood (i.e., how much influence they will have over the end product). You can use a RACI Matrix to categorize team members, administrators, department heads, and other stakeholders and define their roles in the project.
• Provide a feedback mechanism for individual departments to keep them informed about decision-making.

2. Establish a Content Strategy & Management Plan

Large healthcare organizations often need help untangling their content and understanding information architecture considerations, such as how best to position their services, solutions, and vast content collections as opposed to actual products.

START BY CHOOSING THE RIGHT CMS

There are many Content Management Systems (CMS) to choose from — from open-source solutions like Drupal and WordPress to proprietary platforms like Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, Contentful, and more. While the choice largely depends on your specific needs, you’ll want to look for the following fundamental requirements:

• Ability to support flexible, component-based page creation
• Separation of presentation and content to keep content portable
• Centralized management of multiple sites/subsites
• Widespread use so that you can get support and find developers

Learn more about choosing the right CMS.

IDENTIFY ALL EXISTING CONTENT – AND DECIDE WHAT ITS FATE WILL BE

When dealing with large bodies of content, you almost certainly won’t want to migrate all of it as-is. In fact, removing old, stale content that doesn’t contribute to your lead generation or conversion strategy can often elevate the remaining, highly relevant content to top search positions and featured Google snippets. For older content that you do plan to retain, make sure it contains the proper meta tags and publication dates so AI bots and search engines can recognize it as such.

For every site in your healthcare ecosystem, you can use an automated tool like Screaming Frog or Semrush to generate a content inventory so the project team can manually review and organize the collection in a way that makes sense going forward. You’ll want to evaluate and identify:

• Content to eliminate, consolidate, or rewrite
• Who will be responsible for updating/creating content
• Approval/review status for new content

3. Lean Into a Flexible Design Framework

As a rule, we steer large-scale hospital and health system clients towards component-based design solutions because they offer a flexible visual approach driven by their unique content needs. Web pages are built using interchangeable blocks rather than rigid templates. Content managers can mix and match components on the page so the page layout is relevant to the content — rather than forcing all content into the same structure. Content creators enjoy flexibility in the presentation of content, but user experience remains consistent, and the design integrity is maintained.

Creating comprehensive design documentation shows the options, usage, and responsive behavior of each content component — and ensures that designers, developers, and content managers across all related departments are aligned on their expected functionality and design treatments.

4. Choose a Technical Infrastructure That Fits Your Needs

There are several different ways to approach the technical infrastructure for multiple website deployment – the most common are outlined below. Your hospital or healthcare organization’s specific needs will determine which is the right choice for you.

ONE MAIN SITE WITH EMBEDDED SUBSITES

In this approach, there is a single CMS install, and the subsites exist within the main site as robust subsections. When browsing to one of the subsections, the logo, header, and menus may change, but everything is housed in the same CMS instance.

INDIVIDUAL SITES BUILT FROM SHARED BASE COMPONENTS

Each department has its own site and a completely separate instance of the CMS, but the CMS configuration and theme are built from a “base” install that has been customized for your organization.

BUILT-IN MULTISITE CAPABILITIES

Some CMS platforms support a “multi-site” configuration, where each site has its own database for storing content, but is inheriting some or all of its code and configuration from a central parent site. Changes to the parent site are immediately reflected in the other sites, allowing for a “hub and spoke” configuration that provides autonomy for individual sites while still providing central management for updates and configuration.

SITE NETWORK

The WordPress CMS has the concept of a “network” of sites, which are sites that have separate domains but operate from a single WordPress installation. The sites appear to be completely separate, but they all share a database and some configuration can be centrally managed from the WordPress dashboard.

5. Prioritize Analytics, Reporting & Optimization

Finally, you’ll need to take stock of current metrics, key performance indicators, and goal funnels so you can measure success and continue to refine your digital presence post-launch. Start establishing goals with the following important points in mind:

• You may have basic analytics set up, but you’ll want to define specific actions and user flows that are worth tracking and applying goals to. At a minimum, you’ll want to know:
  • Which specific pages attract the most traffic and longest views — and which cause users to bounce or leave the site(s)
  • Which pages support the highest conversions and desired actions
  • The top referring sources of traffic
  • The most common keywords or phrases visitors use to find your site
• If you’re currently running pay-per-click ads and/or social campaigns, conduct an audit of how those campaigns and their associated landing pages are performing.
• If you have more advanced marketing automation, sequencing, and/or gated healthcare content in place, those will need to be identified and included as part of the requirements process for your new site.
• If you don’t have any of the above in place, now is a great time to get started.

Need more help with any of the topics presented here? Read these related whitepapers and guides — and reach out to our team to discuss your hospital or health system’s digital project needs.

• Guide to Multi-Site Web Strategy for Hospitals & Health Systems
• Guide to Enterprise Website Redesign for Healthcare & Hospitals
• Guide to Design Systems for the Web