Wake Forest Baptist Health

Multi-site Partnership with One of the Nation's Preeminent Academic Medical Centers

Wake Forest School of Medicine screenshot

TBG & Wake Forest Baptist Health

TBG (The Berndt Group) partnered with Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center to design and develop a new website in the Ektron content management system.

Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center is one of the nation's preeminent academic medical centers that operates 1,238 acute care, rehabilitation, long-term and psychiatric care beds. The Medical Center is the largest employer in Forsyth County, North Carolina, with more than 11,750 employees and consistently ranks in U.S. News and World Report's "Guide to America's Best Hospitals."

The project kicked off with extensive stakeholder interviews and analysis of Wake Forest Baptist's business requirements. This research and feedback guided TBG's recommended strategy for handling the various complex issues of the current site.

Our solutions included:

enhancing the market-leading brand presence for Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center;
using more appropriate imagery and clarifying the institutional structure for site visitors;
implementing color coded explicit segmented navigation, improving usability for site visitors;
developing related link strategies that allowed site editors to control their related links, while reducing overall site management time;
improving audience conversion, with better calls-to-action, improved usability and tab based user segmentation;
creating a better infrastructure for content development and maintenance; and
integration of A.D.A.M. (medical content) and other automated content capabilities.

With these goals in mind, TBG created wireframes and a site map that laid the ground work for a much improved user experience. We developed designs and templates while the technical development team (a combined team of Wake Forest Baptist and TBG developers) worked on the functional requirements/specifications that served as a blueprint for the developers to implement the site in Ektron, the content management system.

Live Site

What We Did

Technology Partners

Awards

Successful Co-development

TBG developers created base templates and navigation which we handed off to Wake Forest Baptist developers to build out additional site areas. TBG developers also provided guidance and strategies for difficult integrations with external databases like the A.D.A.M. medical reference data.

Noteworthy Site Features

The site has a number of interesting features, including:

integration with various database technologies, including A.D.A.M. data (specialized medical reference data) and custom physician databases;
extensive taxonomy (content relationship) structures creating automatic links of content based on related terms or topics;
more visual calls to action allowing users to find doctors, faculty, and research projects quickly;
improved usability, quick reference information highly visible throughout the site and a more shallow site structure;
high impact, emotionally resonant photography conveying warmth and making a connection with visitors; and
Web Operations Management policies alongside the new CMS implementation allow more streamlined content management and ownership within each department.

A Lasting Partnership

TBG has worked with Wake Forest Baptist on multiple projects, including a redesign of the Brenner Children's Hospital site as well as a branding refresh to the Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center site that we featured in this case study.

Wake Forest Brenner Children's Hospital