Avera, a large integrated health system headquartered in Sioux Falls, SD, covers a lot of ground in the northern United States. With dozens of hospitals and hundreds of clinics serving several states, they’re the primary healthcare choice for thousands of patients and families. Before a recent redesign, flagship site avera.org captured the expanse of service locations, but didn’t make it easy for patients to learn about the wide range of services available no matter where they lived. In interviews, organization stakeholders told Geonetric they wanted to better communicate how easily patients could access all of Avera’s high-quality care and treatment from any point in their health system.

Keeping the Content That Matters Most

Avera recognized the benefit of creating system-level navigation. Duplicate content, such as services information previously found under multiple location-focused sections, was combined into a system-level story about the comprehensive and advanced care Avera delivers across the Upper Midwest. By focusing on the top-viewed pages, Geonetric helped the organization eliminate most of its 9,200 CMS pages—a number that was challenging to manage and meant some pages were hard for users to find. Even while merging a freestanding mobile site with the main site, Avera reduced CMS page count to 500, leaving only the information that matters most to users.

Consulting That Counts

Avera’s marketing team collaborated across the organization to help internal stakeholders understand and prepare for the major changes and opportunities offered by the redesigned site. In support of Avera’s open communication—a huge component of their redesign success—Geonetric’s web strategy and editorial director went onsite to join conversations, answer questions, and help the team visualize the new site structure. Using sticky notes that represented new webpages, she built out the entire site navigation on a conference room wall, making the sitemap easier for stakeholders to review and understand.

Custom Location Pages

Though site content now focuses on system-wide services over specific hospitals and clinics, Avera’s high-profile locations still have a place to tell their story. Custom location pages share visitor guidelines, quality information, contact details, and other facility-specific information. SmartPanels, a feature of Geonetric’s VitalSite CMS, automatically connect these locations with related provider profiles and services content sitewide.

With a saturated healthcare market like Boston in your backyard, it’s important to educate health consumers on the level of care available close to home. Enlisting Geonetric’s expert writing team, Cape Cod Healthcare (CCHC) transformed its reputation from a quaint, community hospital to a major player that can compete with Boston-area health systems and academic medical centers.

Compelling Content

After in-depth research that included stakeholder interviews, Geonetric’s writers developed new content that better communicates the benefits of the health system’s expert doctors and excellent services. In addition, the agency produced new content for 46 service lines, including in-depth content for six key service lines CCHC targeted for increased market share.

Publication of a new, robust heart and vascular section aligned with the launch of CCHC’s Heart and Vascular Institute. All content improves SEO by focusing on users and the benefits they receive from CCHC. Site visitors now understand they can stay close to home while benefiting from CCHC’s medical expertise, superior care, comprehensive services, and clinical partnerships with renowned Boston health care facilities.

Promoting Blood Donations

In addition to winning back market share, CCHC has another, secondary goal for the new site: promoting blood donations.  Through a dedicated page on the website, Cape Cod residents are encouraged to donate blood that will stay on the Cape to help their friends and neighbors. This gives CCHC a unique opportunity to use blood donation as a brand builder, creating a positive experience for donors with the hospital. As an added bonus, these efforts have reduced the amount of blood CCHC has to buy back, saving the organization thousands.

A health library has the power to educate patients and show a healthcare organization’s expertise. But accomplishing this takes much more than attaching the library to a website and hoping users find their way to the content.

Forrest Health, which comprises six hospitals in south Mississippi, wasn’t going to leave it to chance. The organization took strategic steps to make the most of its investment in Healthwise, which provides high-quality articles, videos, and interactive health tools to help patients take charge of their well-being.

Customized Linking Strategy

For advice on drawing more website visitors to these content assets, Forrest Health turned to Geonetric. At the client’s request, the agency focused on webpages about heart and vascular care, one of forresthealth.org’s most-viewed service-line content sections. One simple solution? Linking names of conditions and procedures listed in page copy to relevant health library articles. Now, it takes just one click for users to get detailed information—when and where they want it—about their treatment. And because Healthwise regularly updates its content and reviews it with medical professionals, Forrest Health’s marketing staffers can spend less time worrying about staying on top of advances in medicine.

Right Content, Right Time

On other pages about major service lines, SmartPanels—a feature of Geonetric’s VitalSite CMS—dynamically display links to health library articles related to the page topic. This approach lets Forrest Health easily promote Healthwise content, even without taking time to add customized links to each page’s body copy.

Health library content appears in site search results, too. A visitor looking for information about BMI sees the option to use a Healthwise tool to calculate this number. A search for “breast cancer screening” brings up one of the library’s many interactive Decision Point guides that help patients make informed choices about getting certain tests or treatments. This integrated search functionality lets patients stay on Forrest Health’s site instead of turning to Google to hunt for health information.

Prominent Placement

Forrest Health also links directly to the health library from the site’s secondary navigation. That means users are always just a click away from an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge about health and wellness—no matter what page they’re on.

After launching a new public website, Genesis HealthCare System in Zanesville, OH was ready to tackle the employee intranet. The organization, which serves a six-county region in southeastern Ohio, has seen tremendous growth over the last few years and wanted to create a new internal platform that more closely aligned with its online brand and better served its more than 3,000 employees.

The Features a Growing Health System Needs

Branded “iGenesis,” the intranet is now the hub of internal communications for the busy health system. The new intranet offers enhanced features and functionality including employee directory, department search, cafeteria menus, forms and documents manager, kudos cards, and a news module. And, because the intranet is built on VitalSite, the same platform that runs Genesis HealthCare System’s public website, it’s easier for Genesis HealthCare System to manage both sites and ensure consistency. Utilizing VitalSite also allows the organization to distribute content ownership to many departments while maintaining control over brand standards.

A Focus on Training

With events that include everything from a popular “Walk With a Doc” program to CPR courses, Genesis HealthCare needed sophisticated calendar and events functionality. With VitalSite that’s exactly what they received. iGenesis now allows employees to easily search and register for classes and training. In addition, the education section of the intranet also includes training videos, helping employees enhance their skills.

Managing Policies and Procedures

Genesis HealthCare System also implemented Geonetric’s web-based policy and procedure manager to better manage critical patient care documents. Staff can now securely and easily find documents, and an effective digital workflow notifies staff when documents need to be updated, reviewed, and approved.