Steward Health Care

The Client  

Steward Health Care is a community-based organization with 10 hospital campuses, 24 affiliated urgent care providers, 17,000 employees and more than 4 million patient encounters a year.

The Situation

All of Steward’s facilities offer an integrated model of care, which contrasts traditional fee-for-service payment models. Steward has developed a unique model of service that puts the patient at the center; it needed a digital strategy that would do the same.

The Challenge

When Brian Carty, chief marketing officer at Steward Health Care, turned his attention to a new digital experience, he had lofty aspirations. He wanted Steward to have the best customer experience in healthcare. He looked to leading consumer brands like Amazon, Netflix and USAA when seeking inspiration for a new Steward.org. He wanted to welcome consumers (patients) into the site and offer them a streamlined experience that allowed them to meet their needs quickly and easily. But first he needed to understand what those needs were.

The team at Steward enlisted the help of digital agency Hatch 130 to figure out the "what." Through a combination of site analytics, patient interviews and stakeholder meetings, their fears were confirmed: not only was the user experience poor, but the vast majority of content (89%) was almost never looked at. The old websites had become a "kitchen sink" for physician content, special interest groups and hospital administrators. Any change to the site involved a costly third party, and delivering a personalized experience was out of the question. It was time to start over.

The Solution

Before adopting the Acquia platform, steward.org offered little customer engagement. The site was difficult to navigate, lacked responsive capabilities, and 85% of posted content was never viewed. To make their website patient-centric, Steward sought out to answer two questions:

1. Where do patients get their information?
2. How does a consumer transact business?
    

Steward went straight to the source and surveyed 2,000 patients to understand how users engage online. Steward learned that 30% of patients preferred to use mobile devices when connecting with health care providers. Patients also explained that they prioritized the ability to make an appointment, get directions, and find a physician online. 

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Content Streamlining

The team first eliminated all unnecessary content pages to streamline the experience and enhance the value of the remaining content and restructured it to be patient-centric. At each piece of content, they asked themselves what the patient was looking for.

Video Content

Video content was also a major incorporation into the new site. With the increase of mobile users, video content displayed in short, simple motion graphics would effectively deliver messaging in an easy to understand way.

Mobile Friendly

The websites were also redesigned to be mobile friendly. At the time of the initial analysis, 30 percent of Steward’s traffic was coming from mobile devices, and today, mobile is increasingly becoming the primary access many people have
to the internet.

Unique Features

New tools were put in place to uniquely engage patients. The custom response “dial pad” tool on the home page asks user what it is they
are looking for - and gives it to them quickly. Hatch also implemented tools available within Drupal and Acquia’s ecosystem to learn more about users behavior on the site, and serve up personalized content based on their interactions and history on the site.

The Results

Steward is now leading a new front—pioneering a “patient-user experience” to meet the highest of commercial standards. The results speak for themselves:

Steward is thrilled at the results of their redesign, but they’re just getting started. They have recently implemented Acquia Personalization and are well on their way to providing patients with the right content at the right time on any device.