When Atlantic Health System, serving 1.1 million patients annually across New Jersey, decided to overhaul its website, they discovered a fundamental truth: a poor website reflects poorly on the entire organization. 

The health system’s previous website, redesigned in 2018, failed to meet modern consumer expectations. Through extensive research, including 100 face-to-face interviews and 700 survey responses, three issues emerged. Check out what people said:

• Poor user experience: “The patient has to do more work than the website.”
• Lack of personalization: “The website tries to be all things to all people.”
• Fragmented digital experience: “MyChart is for me; atlantichealth.org is for Atlantic Health.”

Uh-oh.

At the Healthcare Internet Conference in Austin, Joseph Unger, senior manager of digital products at Atlantic Health System and Cynthia Li, client strategy lead at Hero Digital, shared how they listened to these concerns and designed a better website.

Oh, wait — one more statistic: Only 39% of users could successfully find a primary care physician on their first try — a basic, but essential function. After implementing their redesign, this number jumped to 100%.

Phew.

The redesign involved three key phases:

• Phase 1: Foundation building, including homepage redesign and global search
• Phase 2: Creating an in-house physician finder
• Phase 3: Ongoing improvements and feature additions

An important aspect of the redesign was bringing data management in-house.

“Before joining Atlantic Health System, I worked at Verizon where data is core and runs everything, so it was a surprise to see data silos everywhere,” Unger says. “The solution was creating a custom data curation layer that integrates multiple data sources and gives Atlantic Health complete control over the information.”

This new approach offers several advantages:

• Ability to customize physician profiles beyond standard fields
• Freedom to deploy data across multiple platforms
• Direct control over data updates and modifications
• Enhanced ability to match patients with providers based on specific criteria

The project, completed in just seven months for its initial phase, represents a shift in healthcare digital strategy. Rather than redesigning everything at once — which could take years — the team opted for a phased approach that delivered immediate value while building a foundation for future improvements, Li says.

PS: When you’re looking at the website, check out the 9,000+ combinations of illustrated humans that feature a variety of skin types, hair styles, tops and bottoms. These illustrations are swapped out programmatically, creating an inviting, welcoming feeling for website users. Goodbye, stock photos.

This article was written by Jessica Levco, Writer & Event Strategist, who covered HCIC 2024 for Greystone.Net.