Overview
As one of the largest and most respected healthcare providers in the Northwest, Swedish Hospital manages an extensive network of clinics, treatment centers, surgical services, research initiatives, and community programs that patients and healthcare practitioners alike rely on to receive and provide outstanding healthcare. Connecting the vast amount of medical data available to patients who are faced with making difficult healthcare decisions is an ongoing and significant challenge. To address these complexities, Swedish teamed up with Makeen Technologies to deliver patients rich content, a better user experience, and access to relevant healthcare services that combined existing systems, applications, and services in one intuitive, cohesive interface.
The Challenge
Swedish faced three main problems when it came to extending services offered to their patients:
Medical information that could directly benefit their patients was buried too deep on their website making it virtually impossible for the average user to find;
The content was dependent on third party medical libraries that delivered a sub-par user experience and provided minimal value-add;
The level of integration between the Swedish web content management system and their medical library resources was outdated and passed no SEO value.
With this in mind, they aimed to satisfy two goals:
Make information meaningful and actionable by enabling patients experiencing health problems to easily obtain information and educate themselves about their medical condition while at the same time being presented with treatment options and access to providers who they could turn to for outstanding care.
Getting the most out of their investment by using existing content to attract new patients, elevate the level of service they could provide, increase the SEO ranking, and provide a user-friendly application that enabled them to enhance credibility in the industry.
The Discovery
Makeen Technologies worked closely with the client to understand the intricacies of their existing systems and processes taking into consideration their diverse patient demographic, established internal user-base, rapidly evolving technology, and complex workflows to develop a holistic plan that included a feature set based on a thorough and blended understanding of user and business requirements.
Solution
After a careful evaluation of underlying components, Makeen was able to identify the technological dependencies and pinpoint areas that were prime targets for automation, which included:
building a data extraction utility that would merge content from 3rd parties into their existing WCMS
customization to the WCMS code base to enable enhanced functionality for content editors
a complete redesign of their medical conditions online library pages
creation of “smart” WCMS templates which dynamically served up relevant content sources (videos, blogs, research) applicable to the user’s medical condition
advanced tagging and document relations within the WCMS content hierarchy enabling editors to guide users to institute and programs that could provide treatment
a comprehensive strategy for passing SEO value of 3rd party content enabling the client to drive traffic to their site and realize marketing value off of existing content
Summary
By making information meaningful and actionable, Makeen and Swedish were able to solve not just an organizational challenge, but through the power of online applications deliver a service to the public that would have a lasting benefit and stretch beyond normal geographic boundaries.
