Rush University Medical Center

The Challenge

Like many academic medical centers, Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center had a website overly influenced by its organizational structure. Juggling competing priorities and tiptoeing around internal politics often got in the way of effective communication with the medical center’s most important audience: patients.

Rush partnered with Centretek (a leading Drupal agency specializing in health care) to reinvent its digital strategy and website to offer a truly patient-centric online experience. Our approach outlined below pivots the website focus from traditional organizational focused content display to an experience designed to expand brand awareness, engage users through meaningful content rich conversion paths and activate them with strategically minded calls to action, tools, landing pages, social integration and integrated digital campaigns.

The end result is a digital presence capable of guiding a user from awareness through conversion and a platform that allows the Medical Center to amplify its reach, resonance and conversion goals.

Why Drupal?

• It's widely supported by a large number of qualified agencies and development shops (like Centretek).
• It provides a highly flexible and scalable development foundation that can be customized to the organization's specific needs.
• It's proven. There are thousands of high-profile websites running on Drupal, and the overall growth trend for Drupal has been exponential. Additionally, it's being used widely in healthcare with plenty of marquee examples across the industry.
• It's open source software with no licensing costs.
• Rush wanted an easy-to-use platform that allowed internal staff to easily manage content.

Our Approach

Project included:

• Defining organizational and website goals and objectives.
• Analyzing and prioritizing target audiences.
• Implementing a plan for creating optimized landing pages for key departments and services.
• Defining key performance indicators, conversion paths and measures of success.
• Stakeholder and audience interviews.
• Website usage patterns and analytics review.
• SEO analysis and strategy.
• Content and messaging strategy, governance modeling, and training.
• Content migration and site build out.
• Usability testing.
• Information architecture – inventory, reverse card sorting, site maps and wireframes.
• Creative design (including responsive design).
• Implementing their new website built on the Drupal CMS platform.
• Custom theming and module development.
• Drupal performance tuning (e.g. caching tools and techniques).
• Drupal training.

The Result

The end result is a digital presence capable of guiding a user from awareness through conversion and a platform that allows the Medical Center to amplify its reach, resonance and conversion goals. Online appointment requests and resulting new patients have increased significantly (up 58 percent). The website also received the award for Best Overall Internet Site at the eHealthcare Leadership Awards - the leading industry awards program than generates over 1,000 submissions annually.