How Healthcare Improvement Experts Built a Whole New Digital Experience

Virginia Mason Institute is a globally recognized healthcare process improvement expert consulting with hospitals and health systems in the United States and across the world in places like Australia, the United Kingdom, and Qatar. But if you visited their website, you wouldn't have known because the site hadn't received a comprehensive update in more than a decade.

Aligning a global reputation with a modern digital experience

The site hadn’t received a comprehensive update in more than a decade. As they sought to drive more impact with health systems, this created considerable challenges:

• The dated design reduced trust in the organization, complicating things when prospects visited to verify their credibility during the sales process.
• The services listed on the site didn’t reflect their current offerings, making it difficult to generate relevant leads for the deep engagements with hospitals and health systems that they are ideally built for.
• VMI’s new course offerings were not adequately showcased.
• Resources were difficult to find due to a legacy knowledge center with content that had outgrown the overall site design.

VMI asked A Brave New to develop a modernized site that would update the overall brand visual identity while remaining true to the overall Virginia Mason brand. The other major ask was to create a site that was simple but also deep, allowing users to dig in and learn about the specifics of VMI’s approach and their services, as well as driving ease of exploration throughout a newly redesigned knowledge center.

Discovering the path forward

Every website redesign we complete begins with a discovery and strategy development process. During this first phase we conduct internal and external stakeholder interviews, a full content audit of the site, and review site analytics to identify opportunities.

During this process we uncovered multiple insights that would drive our redesign process:

• Results needed to be front and center: Because of the dated nature of the previous site and its lack of alignment with current offerings, it was difficult to emphasize the results VMI had achieved. The new site needed to showcase these results to provide quantifiable proof of the effectiveness of VMI’s process.

• We needed a way to showcase the process without making it difficult to understand: Process improvement in the healthcare space is necessarily complex. It also cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach. It was essential that we convey that VMI had a strong structure and system for approaching their work that would guarantee results, while also having the flexibility to work with varying clients and help them adapt VMI’s philosophy to their specific organizations.

• The old site sold individual engagements, not strategic partnerships: VMI has the greatest impact when they can engage with health systems in long-term strategic partnerships with a broad scope of work. The new site needed to position this as the norm while also allowing folks to purchase individual solutions if appropriate.
• Simplicity would be essential to driving action and understanding: At the end of the day, we knew that we could drive more results if we could simplify the site, making it clear and straightforward for users to find the information they need and take action.

Turning insights into action

The new VMI site focuses on data-driven and visual storytelling with the homepage, as well as a page focusing on the organization’s approach to showcase why VMI does their work, how they accomplish it, and the results they’re able to drive for their clients. Rather than having to hunt for this information, prospects can now immediately answer those questions within a few minutes of landing on the site.

Our team also trimmed down the Service pages in favor of the strategic engagements most important to VMI’s work. These new pages clearly showcase the value of the engagement, provide deep explanations of how they work, and include clear calls to action to get started. This, coupled with clear and succinct explanations of VMI’s courses and certification programs, makes it easy for visitors to find the engagement right for them and start the process.

Finally, we conducted a comprehensive redesign of the knowledge center that houses hundreds of blog posts, podcasts, and other resources. The new knowledge center is clean, intuitive, and searchable. It’s also integrated throughout, with relevant content showcased on pages throughout the site.

A website designed to perform

The redesigned VMI website showcases a refreshed look and feel while staying true to the Virginia Mason brand.

In addition to the new design, the revised information architecture reduces the number of service pages, and retires more than 80 irrelevant or out-of-date resources. As a result, bounce rates post-launch immediately improved.

The final benefit of the new site is full and complete integration with the business development team’s activities thanks to the platform choice. The entire site is built on a custom theme within HubSpot Content Hub, enabling tight integration with HubSpot’s Sales and CRM tools that are the engine behind the VMI business development team’s activities.

Explore the redesigned Virginia Mason Institute website and experience the transformation for yourself: Visit virginiamasoninstitute.org

This article is adapted from a case study originally published by A Brave New. Read the full case study, VMI Website Redesign, on abravenew.com.