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Nebraska Methodist Health System

A streamlined platform for patients and caregivers

Optimizing the patient journey

Nebraska Methodist Health System (NMHS) delivers top quality healthcare to Omaha, eastern Nebraska and western Iowa through four hospitals, more than 30 health clinics and a nursing and allied health college. More babies are delivered and more surgical procedures are undertaken there than any other facility in Nebraska. The non-profit system also provides primary care and specialty services through two dozen facilities.

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Situation

The marketing team needed to consolidate their 12+ core digital properties into a single streamlined platform, and create a new, intuitive customer journey through the site.

Solution

NMHS partnered with Palantir to build a secure, scalable, and open source platform in Drupal 9. The new site simplifies the customer journey and delivers a modern, fresh look and feel.

Impact

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. And by streamlining their content the workload of the marketing and content teams has been cut by 75%.

The Situation

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NMHS’s core digital presence was sprawled across over 12+ websites all built on an outdated, proprietary CMS.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.

The Solution

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.
 

Methodist homepage after image After

Impact

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.

Projects like this can be overwhelming, but the Palantir team made it easy from day one. Not only did they listen to our needs and challenges up front, they helped problem solve along the way to ensure we stayed within scope, on budget and on time. We felt in-sync every step of the way with everyone from designers to strategists to developers. We couldn't be more excited about what we created together.

- Bryan Gottula, Digital Marketing Manager

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