CHRISTUS Health

Website Redesign & Sitecore Implementation

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Location Finder

The new location finder on CHRISTUShealth.org not only demonstrates the impressive scale of the health system—as a multi-state and country entity—but also represents the integrated and comprehensive set of offerings, such as hospitals, clinics, and centers, via a birds-eye view map of the entire system. Located in roughly a dozen states and four countries, all of the CHRISTUS Health locations’ accordion content now feature a full menu of information, such as a phone number, link to directions, and visiting hours, and have been indexed by search engines for improved usability.

Check out the locations experience

Faceted Search

An interactive search featured prominently on the CHRISTUS Health homepage allows users to find targeted content quickly. The easily navigable portlet allows for the user to quickly search for a location, provider, or treatment. In using either of these three search bars, the user’s query will search content across all subsites of the vast CHRISTUS Health digital ecosystem.

Highly-Scalable Sitecore Architecture

With a wide array of facilities and service offerings, the new CHRISTUS experience required a flexible, scalable architecture that allows for varied content (and user capacities) in key areas, such as the hospital and department pages. Utilizing Sitecore CMS, TBG produced a highly-scalable architecture that allows for the digital team to easily spin up new location detail pages. But the robust, advanced templates can go much further: they are built to ultimately leverage Sitecore’s rich personalization and engagement automation feature set throughout.

Micro-Animations & Interaction Design

CHRISTUShealth.org is a modern site with an interface that is far from dull or static. The new CHRISTUS Health experience is peppered with micro-animations and user interaction that substantially improve usability, site accessibility, and the overall user experience. Scrolling of the page prompts an animated header, and hovering over links prompts changes in the text color, animated underlining, image highlighting, and movement of buttons. These seemingly small but dynamic, substantial interactions are essential for a contemporary digital experience, breathe life into the branding of CHRISTUS Health, and encourage users to continue on their journeys through the site. Users may not even consciously notice them, but they dramatically contribute to a positive brand impression.

TBG & CHRISTUS

CHRISTUS Health is an international Catholic, faith-based, not-for-profit health system comprised of nearly 600+ services and facilities, including more than 60 hospitals and long-term care facilities, 350 clinics and outpatient centers, and dozens of other health ministries and ventures. Over the last decade, CHRISTUS Health has expanded their mission to include facilities in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. The expansion in key Latin American countries has provided CHRISTUS with the opportunity to utilize business and clinical expertise and infrastructure to quickly improve the access and affordability of health care in Latin America.

CHRISTUS Health prides itself on a caring, mission-driven culture and the ability to bring healthcare to people in many regions with specific geographic considerations. Needless to say, such a large, diverse organization has digital needs that make it different from many other healthcare organizations. With the launch of the new CHRISTUShealth.org site, the organization is one of TBG’s premier multi-state healthcare clients and the fuel for many interesting new techniques and discoveries.

When TBG and CHRISTUS began working together, the initial challenge was to unify the brand and user experiences of CHRISTUS' multifaceted digital ecosystem, which consists of dozens of medical facilities, from hospitals to hospice care, and which spans almost 10 states. To meet this challenge, TBG designed a minimalistic and streamlined technical information architecture—one that, in fact, mirrors its surrounding environment. In other words, the sophisticated simplicity that's visible in the user experience and visual design across the new site is a manifestation of the system's underlying architecture. The architecture is nested so that each level of the ecosystem houses its immediate children. The model is efficient and it made sense to the digital team at CHRISTUS, which was crucial to the success of the project. To build an innovative and elegant architectural solution that meets the needs of the internal as well as external users is a huge win!

The site needed to not only meet the previous requirement—unifying the brand and user experiences across dozens of medical facilities—the project also aimed to keep the operational and resourcing needs of the CHRISTUS team in mind. To do this, TBG optimized the power of Sitecore's CMS to scale the content in a way that prized efficiency through content federation. Specifically, the team needs a model that scales effectively to support automated content publishing. Our solution is a federated content model that hinges on the efficiency of the information architecture to create a one-to-many publishing model. A description of a service, for example, can be shared across sites—meanwhile dynamically updating context-specific fields. It's a tool like a pulley or an amplifier: a small amount of human efforts scales to create a big effect.

With so many moving pieces (i.e. the variety of sites that make up the CHRISTUS digital ecosystem) we quickly realized the need for a holistic UX model that could be applied systematically. In other words, we needed a model that would bring a sense of order and continuity to the user experience across a plethora of sites. It was crucial to create a straightforward experience that simultaneously conveyed CHRISTUS' rich value proposition as a system of healthcare offerings as well as the user's (digital) position at any given time within that digital ecosystem. One tactic we utilized included streamlining the header and hero areas to a minimal set of core actions (searching for a location, finding a doctor, and researching services and treatments). This was standardized across sites and allows users to focus their searches within the subsystem that they are in (i.e. the main site will search all content across all subsites; a subsite will restrict the search result data to that which is relevant to that subsite).

As we continue with our collaboration with CHRISTUS Health, the ecosystem is moving into CRM integration with Sitecore on campaign landing pages, personalization, and engagement automation. The site is built in Sitecore to evolve, scaling up in size and sophistication based on user needs. All of the templates are flexibly engineered in Sitecore to maximize Web operations.

"After a rigorous search for an implementation partner, CHRISTUS Health chose TBG, whose team delivered us a strategically driven/user-centric design that helps our patients solve their health-related problems. Their MVP-certified knowledge of Sitecore, level of service and support received and knowledge of the healthcare space is second to none."

Michael Fouratt

System Director of Digital Engagement

Live Site

What We Did

Technology Partners

Awards

600+ Services & Facilities
Operating in 4 Countries
10,000+ Pages of Content
200+ Patient Stories
350+ Provider Pages

Captivating, Consumer-Focused Design
Consolidating Multi-Site Strategy
Advanced Location Logistics
Federated Content Across Sites

Captivating, Consumer-Focused Design

Drawing on inspiration from design principles by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher, who advocate for designing with compassion in Design for Real Life, the TBG design team created the user experience to make information accessible to the most stressed users, for instance, in the event that a patient urgently needs to find a specialist or that a parent needs to take an injured child to the emergency room. The prominently featured search portlet, with the ability to search locations, treatments, and providers, allows users to easily access the information they need. The homepage yields a sense of compassion and calmness; it showcases a welcoming, market-leading brand presence that the user can fully trust. The combination of font choices and treatments, strategic use of colors, professional high-impact photography, well-designed calls-to-action, and the inclusion of more “white space” within the design come together to create a captivating, consumer-focused design. TBG established consistent design patterns with the various design elements and users may optimally view the Responsive site across a range of devices and window sizes.

Consolidating Multi-Site Strategy

The project conquers the challenge of consolidating the sites for the multitude of CHRISTUS facilities—hospitals, clinics, ministries, and more—through a number of tactics. The creation of search-engine-friendly redirects helps to retain vanity URLs, and site offerings are centralized via architecting content reuse with their service lines. The new site’s strategy focuses on conveying a cohesive set of services offered by the health system and the related benefits of being a consumer of an integrated health system. Utilizing Sitecore CMS, the various facility sites have optimized the value of site content with reuse and customization, creating a much more efficient ecosystem.

Advanced Location Logistics

CHRISTUShealth.org features a locations and directions tool built with a Google Maps API. By leveraging Google’s robust maps with a customized front-end integrated to pull data from Sitecore, TBG created a filterable visualization of CHRISTUS’ varied locations. The previous site didn’t have a map view; with the new location finder, users can easily see where facilities are located on the map, access driving directions with one click, and easily identify (with different colored pinpoints) location types, such as a hospital, primary care, urgent care, pediatrics, and specialty care. The TBG design team again drew on inspiration from Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s principles about designing for crisis situations in Design for Real Life: site users who are in an emergency situation should be able to gain information with one click, like driving directions to an emergency room. As the system grows, the map demonstrates CHRISTUS Health’s widespread, global presence in a visual way, which produces a strong brand impression for patients and families who seek a large, sophisticated healthcare leader.

Federated Content Across Sites

The new CHRISTUS digital experience utilizes Sitecore’s Federated Experience Manager, which allows the Christus digital team to extend the reach of Sitecore’s marketing and content delivery capabilities to sites that don’t run on the CMS. With a vast digital universe of various facility sites, CHRISTUS needs to have the ability to quickly and easily manage content on non-Sitecore sites and gather data from them. Digital operations at CHRISTUS have improved significantly due to the ability to manage content that appears on multiple location/facility sites and in portlets, etc. For example, a content editor can enter a description of heart disease in one place on the back end and it will appear in all of the cardiology-related pages across the system.

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