Now To Next Takes Clients
From Great To Even Better

The big idea.

Our challenge was to take a decentralized digital ecosystem that included 270+ websites from multiple hospitals, 6,800+ pages of content, little governance and oversight and minimal measurement planning in order to develop a digital platform that consolidated the health system’s footprint and addressed needed improvements in site architecture and infrastructure.

As an evolving academic medical center, Northwestern Medicine needed to better engage with prospective patients along their healthcare journey by bringing them closer to doctors and care locations. The focus was to establish a foundation and platform to support NM as a growing and expanding integrated academic health system, all while providing a patient-first experience. 

Why it worked.

Our digital strategy and vision set a path for Northwestern Medicine to become a unified healthcare system offering a patient-first experience. The website foundation zeroed in on six key areas, each addressed with a specific goal in mind:

• Patient insights: Extensive primary and secondary research as well as a variety of tools were used to capture patient insights and feedback. A process was developed to analyze and adjust for ongoing improvement. 
• Patient-centered: LC identified six personas and concentrated on understanding each persona’s unique needs for primary (e.g. Find a Doctor, Find a Location, etc.) and secondary tasks (e.g. My Chart, Careers, etc.). 
• Marketing technology and Infrastructure: Based on LC platform recommendations, Sitecore was chosen due to its flexibility to work with large IT legacy platforms as well as having the ability to provide solutions that are constantly evolving and introducing new innovations. 
• Content: Our content strategy was based on the healthcare journey and how prospective and current patients searched and found information.  An overall structure was created – called the ‘four-pillar’ approach. Using this approach, Service Line content for the new NM.org was organized into a consistent structure. The content strategy was built around the concept that users seeking information on NM.org are typically searching first by condition. Our four-pillar approach to conditions asked: 
  • What are the Condition Symptoms? 
  • What are the Causes and Diagnoses? 
  • What are the Treatments? 
  • Who are the Specialists who treat the Condition, and where are they located? 
• Measurement: The measurement and tracking plan  honed in on customer activity, engagement and completion of primary and secondary journeys. An online “self-service” dashboard was also created for stakeholders to be able to access primary KPI data in real-time.
• Process and governance: Governance process allowed us to scale and evolve content while following website and brand guidelines. We worked closely with the NM IT team to ensure technologies, processes and security all aligned.

Creatively, we explored and defined visual expressions, principles, elements and a final layout that tailored the look and feel to established brand guidelines and strategic positioning. The end product resulted in a scalable and repeatable design system, increasing efficiency by providing the team with a common language while producing a cohesive experience for users. 

Related work.