SITUATION
A nonprofit healthcare organization in the western U.S. providing hospital care, community health, and educational services was relying on a mix of third-party CMS solutions, including Sitecore, to power multiple websites, mobile apps, digital marketing, and content management.
Sitecore combines content management, e-commerce and digital marketing tools into one platform to create, tailor and personalize the customer experience—features that were essential to an organization with aggressive goals to grow content and increase engagement. However, prior to creating a unified corporate IT team, the many hospitals and clinics in the healthcare organization’s network operated in silos with their own regional instances of Sitecore, with the result that the customer experience and terminology varied from site to site.
The mix of Sitecore instances led to overlapping and redundant efforts to maintain content and manage digital properties. Corporate messaging had to be rolled out within each region separately. As more clinics and hospitals joined the network, operational process and technical debt grew as well, hampering the organization’s ability to grow and unify their patient and consumer experiences on digital channels.
CHALLENGE
The healthcare organization knew it needed to streamline its CMS solution. The company had previously partnered with AIM Consulting on a comprehensive Native Mobile App CMS Assessment and Strategy and opted to reinvest in Sitecore as its primary digital platform. The next step was to consolidate its many instances of Sitecore into a single new instance to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) and improve operational efficiency. As their legacy version of Sitecore was scheduled to lose support after 2018, there was added urgency to migrate.
Having relied on AIM Consulting to provide the research that helped them arrive at the strategy, the healthcare organization turned again to the technology consulting company to manage the migration to a new consolidated, white-label instance of Sitecore that would provide better performance, stability and usability as well as be more agile and scalable to support the organization’s expected growth.
SOLUTION
AIM Consulting began by evaluating all active sites and services on the current infrastructure and creating a snapshot of the current state and future state. This included mapping out how many Sitecore instances were being used in which regions, such as Washington and Montana, and mapping their dependencies.
Using staggered execution phases, AIM performed custom development to build out components, functionality, templates and designs that were equivalent to the previous versions or improved upon them. AIM then migrated content to the new instance in such a way that content, code and templates could be shared by the healthcare organization’s network of hospitals, clinics, and community centers across geographic locations and service teams. In addition, the new version of Sitecore introduced machine learning to improve marketing automation and contextualized user experiences built on business intelligence.
RESULTS
Going forward, the healthcare organization has a new, unified digital platform that has greatly reduced its total cost of ownership (TCO) as well as streamlining management of content and delivering consistent brand experiences. The healthcare organization’s teams can now start retiring their old instances of Sitecore while experimenting with new features. Ultimately, the new, unified digital platform solution on Sitecore will enable the healthcare organization to increase conversion and retention rates by improving the overall user experience to be more customer and patient-centered.
