The London Clinic

The Client

One of England’s largest private hospitals, The London Clinic is a registered charity based in central London. 

The Situation

Celebrating its 90th anniversary, the Clinic faced a critical point in its history. Fast-growing trends in self-service healthcare, including health wearables, online pharmacies, and virtual appointments raised customer expectations about digital healthcare experiences. The Clinic wanted its digital experience to empower patients to take control of their own healthcare, providing transparency, choice, and self-service so patients could decide when and how they want to be treated. 

With this goal in mind, the Clinic launched a new positioning strategy, shifting from a traditional B2B brand to a patient-centric brand. The primary goals for its new site were to reflect this positioning as well as its leading hospital status, empower visitors to take action with their healthcare and in return, achieve a higher number of self-pay conversions on the site. 

The Challenge

When the Clinic started its project in early March 2020, the world was unaware of the upcoming challenges. On March 23, the UK’s first COVID-19 nationwide lockdown was announced. This had an immediate and significant impact on non-COVID-19 hospital care as patients could not be seen. NHS treatment backlog and patient waitlists quickly grew to unprecedented levels – something that had started happening before COVID became a factor. During this time, The London Clinic pivoted to partner with the NHS to keep cancer services running for those most in need.

The reality was that many patients had been suffering for a long time – or had been let down by healthcare providers – either because they weren’t provided the treatment they needed or didn’t have options to choose from. The Clinic wanted to give this choice back to patients so that they could take control of their own healthcare journeys. With its website serving as one of its primary portals, the Clinic saw the benefit of providing easy, clear, and transparent access to key information about treatments and procedures, helping patients find and book the right consultant, and offering transparent pricing and information that gives them the confidence to take the next step.

The Solution

The Clinic partnered with digital transformation firm TPXimpact to help achieve its vision of transforming its digital estate into a best-in-class service for patients, reflecting its leading hospital status. In practice, this meant a fundamental shift, including an overhaul of its brand positioning, website experience, and technical architecture. 

After an extensive tech selection process, Drupal was selected as the CMS and Acquia Cloud Platform was selected for its ability to support Drupal with guaranteed uptime, scalability, offsetting risk, continuity, and reducing the need for additional support resources. Additionally, the extensibility of Drupal and its API-led services enabled easy integration with other systems and a decoupled front end.

Working together to transform the Clinic’s digital experience, the teams put users at the center of everything they did, including:

• Audience research: 500+ interactions and engagement with UK and international audiences, building in-depth customer insight. 
• Behavior-led UX: Based on customer behaviors and needs, TPXimpact created intuitive journeys that made it easy for patients to find a treatment or consultant and take action. Powerful Acquia Search was central to this, with complex taxonomy and tagging, fuzzy search, and filtering making navigation easy and enjoyable.
• Inclusive design: The teams considered accessibility from the ground up and designed and tested the site to exceed WCAG 2.1 AA standards. 
• Storybook pattern library: Using atomic design, TPXimpact created carefully considered experiences from the most minor interactions, implementing through Storybook with inbuilt tools to create more meaningful user experiences.
• Transparency: The site’s consultant pages include detailed, consistent information to support patients’ decisions, from pricing to Doctify ratings and experience.

The Results

The new site has significantly impacted the business and its commercial objectives. In the three months since its launch, The London Clinic saw an increase in the site’s overall conversion rate from 5% to 9%. Specifically, there was a 20% increase in self-pay patient inquiries – a priority customer group for the Hospital. 

There has also been increased time on the site, particularly on consultant pages, showing that visitors are engaging with the information. Additionally, the site’s bouncerate has dropped by 6%. 

Anecdotally, the Clinic received great feedback from stakeholders and patients on the new digital experience. Recent user testing saw the site rated “extremely user friendly.” Comments also highlighted how well the site is optimized for mobile.