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