University of Missouri Health Care

The Challenge

MU Health Care’s previous website did not support a strong patient experience, failed to effectively convert prospective patients, lacked an intuitive architecture and content strategy, and had grown bloated. Additionally, the website lacked an effective mobile optimized user experience, and had accessibility challenges. To complicate matters further, it was dependent on an outdated proprietary WCMS that prohibited MU Health Care’s staff from easily managing their own website.
Beyond the technical and design limitations, the website did not effectively address consumer misperceptions and appropriately reflect the MU Health Care brand. Specifically, some consumers had outdated ideas about MU Health Care’s depth and breadth of specialty care for complex medical conditions, and the quality and age of the facilities.

The Solution

The Centretek team led an extensive discovery and strategy effort that defined the requirements for the new website and provided a roadmap for a digital engagement strategy. The new solution included the following highlights.

Solid, Secure, Scalable Foundation

The site is built on Drupal 8 and the Acquia Cloud, which provides 24-hour hosting environment monitoring and support that effectively alleviates concerns regarding site down time. Acquia also provides a scalable foundation to easily add additional websites and explore strategies for introducing content personalization via Acquia Lift.

Increased Ability to Address Marketing Challenges

Through extensive discovery and stakeholder engagement, the Centretek team developed a UX, design and content strategy that directly addressed MU Health Care’s challenges and misperceptions related to outdated facilities, lack of in-market awareness for specialty care, and leakage for specialty/complex care services to St. Louis and Kansas City.
For example, the site offers flexible templates that allow for customizable landing pages. The MU Health Care team capitalized on this flexibility, working with Centretek to develop different landing pages for each of the priority service lines. These differences highlight the unique capabilities and distinctions among priority service lines, while still maintaining the feel of the University of Missouri Health Care brand.

The Centretek team delivered more than 400 pages of new consumer-driven content. Previous site content was internally focused and often driven by internal organizational structure; in addition, it was generic and didn’t highlight MU Health Care’s distinguishing capabilities as an academic medical center. The newly written content focused on addressing consumers’ need to find services related to their concern and highlighting treatment options and care specific to MU Health Care.

Innovative Care, Modern Medicine

The website’s design, UX and content strategy directly address outdated consumer perceptions. Engaging, custom shot photography and video showcases MU Health Care’s modern facilities and advanced specialty care.

From Sniffles to Surgeries

In addition to proving leading specialty care, MU Health Care also needs to market its primary care services for common health issues. The new website addresses this through prominent messaging and calls to action.

Strategic Use of Photography and Video

The site incorporates engaging custom photography and videos shot throughout the MU Health Care campus to showcase the facilities while making them more approachable to potential consumers.

Showcase the Breadth of Services and Locations

The Locations section offers an interactive location search with mapping features built on top of Google maps. It also offers consumers the ability to customize their search by using their current location.

Leverage Content Marketing Strengths

The site prominently features an Our Stories section that features patient stories showcasing the services MU Health Care offers. These patient stories were housed previously on a separate site, causing MU Health Care to lose out on the traffic being generated via social media channels. Now, the team is able to direct that traffic to MU Health Care, where the stories use Drupal’s taxonomy to dynamically cross-promote relevant clinical services throughout the site via contextual tagging.

Improved search functionality

Through the combination of consumer-focused content and use of Solr, the site allows for an improved onsite search experience with faceted, predictive (auto complete) and phonetic search capabilities.

The Results

Award-winning user experience

The site won double gold at the 2017 W3 Awards and gold at the 2017 Daveys, awards specifically for smaller agencies. The prestigious W3 and Davey Awards are both judged by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts, an invitation-only body consisting of professionals from acclaimed media, advertising and marketing firms. Additionally, this work has been recognized by the Acquia Engage Awards and eHealthcsare Leadership Awards.

• 2018 Acquia Engage Awards for Leader of the Pack in Healthcare
• 2018 eHealthcare Leadership Awards - Best Mobile Website (Healthcare System) - Gold
• 2018 eHealthcare Leadership Awards - Best Site Design (Healthcare System) - Silver
• 2018 eHealthcare Leadership Awards - Best Site Design (School of Medicine) - Silver
• General website: Health care services – Gold (W3)
• Website features: User experience – Gold (W3)
• Websites: Health – Gold (Davey)

Measures of Success

• 442% increase in Make Appointment pageviews (a key metric for healthcare websites)
• 18% increase in average user session length
• 15% increase in doctor profile pageviews (a key metric for healthcare websites)
• 23% increase in organic search traffic to doctor profile pages
• 11% increase in locations (hospitals and clinics) page views
• 19% increase in organic search traffic to locations pages (hospitals and clinics)
• 49% increase in Quick Care pageviews
• 32% increase in organic search traffic to Quick Care pages
• 22% increase in Giving (donations) pageviews
• 4% increase in overall organic search traffic
• 13% decrease in overall bounce rate
• Significant increase in online appointment requests *
• Increase in appointment phone calls *
• Increase in online video visits scheduled *

* These metrics were not accurately tracked on the previous website, so we don’t have quantifiable statistics for them. However, we can conclude there were significant increases based the uptick in calls and new appointments.

School of Medicine Website

In additional to leading the strategy, design and development for the new MU Health Care website, the Centretek team also lead the redesign and development of the MU School of Medicine website - https://medicine.missouri.edu/.