A Top Globally Ranked Cancer Institute
Engaging Diverse Audiences As They Navigate Cancer Care
What if...a new website could become a powerful, go-to resource for patient engagement and education?
Living with a cancer diagnosis is a fraught, emotionally charged experience for patients and their support networks. This anxiety can be unnecessarily compounded when care management is difficult to navigate or understand.
Our client's patients and their families often struggled through a complex and confusing patient journey. This was especially true for integrated pediatric care delivered by our client with their neighboring children’s hospital.
A Fragmented Experience Left Patients and Internal Teams Needing Answers
Further, our client’s content management system (CMS) was outdated, beyond its lifecycle, and not compliant with security protocols. The Patient Education department faced challenges centralizing information and operations, relying on manual content processes that hindered agility and brand cohesion.
We wanted to improve the digital patient journey and help support better health equity and outcomes for our client by providing a more intuitive site experience that relieves stress on patients and their families.
Driving Health Equity and Outcomes by Deeply Understanding the Consumer
The providers wanted to offer modern, cohesive digital front doors that ease access and engage diverse audiences, including those from historically marginalized communities.
Recognizing the partnership needed more than a surface-level website refresh, the cancer center sought a partner with technical expertise and knowledge of the healthcare consumer experience to help it identify and overcome content gaps and accessibility barriers.
Our industry and technology experts envisioned an intuitive, centralized website experience that supports patients and their support networks with tailored, relevant educational content across the care journey.
We met with diverse groups of constituents to pinpoint challenges they experienced when navigating the existing sites. Next, we assessed the various audiences that the client wanted to engage and created seven new target personas with journey maps for each.
We audited the existing site content and led planning sessions with key stakeholders across the organization to identify and align on KPIs that would ensure measurable, sustained success.
Equipped with these insights, we provided strategic recommendations to:
- Streamline and automate the internal content creation workflow
- Add language support to increase the reach and efficacy of patient education resources
- Modernize technology and reimagine the crucial capabilities and roles needed to support scalable, ongoing site maintenance and improvement
Building a Foundation to Power Connections and Outcomes
We migrated two of our client's websites from the dated CMS to Acquia and streamlined content creation using Drupal and CKEditor 5, replacing collaboration and editing that was historically fragmented across Smartsheets and shared drives.
Drupal views and reports ensure timely content review while LanguageLine manages translations. Branded PDFs are generated and stored in Acquia DAM for consistent linking while Acquia CMS APIs facilitated content display and searchability.
We identified common content, such as calls to action that help patients find relevant next steps on their journey, that could be created once then quickly placed on multiple pages using the Component Content feature in Acquia Site Studio. This reduced development time and costs and accelerated content migration from the original site.
Further, we integrated brand standards of the two independent organizations into a single design system. With Acquia CMS and the Site Studio component library, authors can easily create unique layouts and build accessible, intuitive pages that ease patient engagement and maximize conversions.
Our industry and technology experts envisioned an intuitive, centralized website experience that supports patients and their support networks with tailored, relevant educational content across the care journey.
Results
Supporting Patients and Caregivers With an Informative, Accessible Site
Our strategic research coupled with our platform and content optimization increased accessibility and improved site functionality for patients and their care support systems.
Internal teams can manage and collaboratively create well-branded, well-governed educational content and web pages with greater ease and agility.
The new site experience and educational resources transform the way the cancer center engages with its diverse community of patients and caregivers and has enhanced patient confidence in our client.
