Case Study: Kootenai Health

About the Organization

Located in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Kootenai Health provides a comprehensive range of medical services to patients in north Idaho, eastern Washington, Montana and the Inland Northwest at several facility locations. The main campus includes a 246-bed community-owned hospital.

Scenario

Kootenai Health had an existing website, but the content management system (CMS) was outdated, and the design, while user friendly, was not impactful. Sequent was tasked with moving the site into a true enterprise-level CMS and creating a new design to match the professionalism of the organization. In short, we had to design and implement a website that would impress the local and regional community.

Implementation

Our first step was to get Kootenai Health into a robust CMS. Based on a set of favorable features, Blackbaud’s Sphere platform was chosen. Over the course of six months, we worked tirelessly with the Kootenai team to update every page of content and develop a set of tools to make the new website usable and functional. On December 21, 2012 we launched the new site.

Features

Expanded Menu Structure

Sometimes referred to as a “Mega Menu,” the Kootenai expanded navigation structure allows site visitors the ability to find all aspects of the website in a condensed area.No longer does it take three and four click to find an specific page, nor do users have to deal with clunky multiple levels of drop-down menus.

But we didn’t stop with simple static links. The expanded menu items also include embedded functionality. There is a set of dynamic drop downs for locations and directions, and a tab with a database lookup to search for a physician.

The specific menu items are listed carefully, ensuring the most popular links (as defined by our analytics assessment) are listed appropriately.

Physician Biographies

A key point of emphasis during requirements gathering was to focus on the physicians. Based on analytics, it was clear that site visitors wanted to see information about a specific physician or search for a common group of physicians. Our solution was to use a database-driven lookup to allow site visitors to search for a physician by name, department, or specialty.

However, we didn’t stop there. The previous iteration of the Kootenai website listed a minimal amount of information on a physician’s biography. We wanted to provide a better layout with an increased amount of data for site visitors to review. The result was a user-friendly layout that maximized the horizontal space available with the larger site layout. Additionally, the data exposed allows a visitor to contact a physician and view their department website or webpage for information.

Newsroom

The final major aspect to tackle was an new and improved newsroom portal. Kootenai Health was fortunate enough to have a first-class communications team, so content and updates wouldn’t be an issue. The trick was to provide their team an interface to properly exploit the quality of the content being developed…both in terms of digital and print updates.