Sector(s)

Team Members

Spacoli, pwilson

Project Team

The CentreTEK Solutions team was led by

Jemal Cole - Lead Developer
Patrick Wilson - Lead Developer
RuSean Myers - Lead Designer
Glen Doss - Account Manager
Ryan Grieb - Project Manager

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Like many academic medical centers, Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center had a website overly influenced by its organizational structure. Juggling competing priorities and tiptoeing around internal politics often got in the way of effective communication with the Medical Center’s most important audience: patients. CentreTEK partnered with Rush to reinvent its digital strategy and website to offer a truly patient-centric online experience. Our approach outlined below pivots the website focus from traditional organizational focused content display to an experience designed to expand brand awareness, engage users through meaningful content rich conversion paths and activate them with strategically minded calls to action, tools, landing pages, social integration and integrated digital campaigns. The end result is a digital presence capable of guiding a user from awareness through conversion and a platform that allows the Medical Center to amplify its reach, resonance and conversion goals.

About the project

Our Approach

CentreTEK recently led the website redesign, CMS implementation, and larger digital strategy for Rush University Medical Center (launched in September 2014). Our work included:

  • Defining organizational and website goals and objectives.
  • Analyzing and prioritizing target audiences.
  • Implemented a plan for creating optimized landing pages for key departments and services.
  • Defining key performance indicators, conversion paths and measures of success.
  • Stakeholder and audience interviews.
  • Website usage patterns and analytics review.
  • SEO analysis and strategy.
  • Content and messaging strategy, governance modeling, and training.
  • Content migration and site build out.
  • Usability testing.
  • Information architecture – inventory, reverse card sorting, sitemaps and wireframes.
  • Creative design (including responsive design)
  • Implemented their new website built on the Drupal CMS platform.
  • Custom theming and module development.
  • Drupal performance tuning (e.g. caching tools and techniques)
  • Drupal training

The Results

The new Rush University Medical Center website sets the bar for what innovative, patient-centric healthcare looks like on the Web. Highlights include:

  • Fully responsive design
  • Streamlined information architecture, navigation and calls to action to drive increased conversions
  • The site uses a robust taxonomy scheme to cross-promote and inter-relate content across the website.
  • The website integrates with multiple third-party systems and data sources including an external Physician Directory.
  • Custom treatments and conditions content developed by Rush and our team.
  • Solr search implementation with real-time, predictive and phonetic search with faceted filtering. This is a seriously smart search. Try misspelling something like “dyabeates.”
  • Custom video library - http://www.rush.edu/health-wellness/video-library
  • Custom interactive map and virtual tour - http://www.rush.edu/interactive-map

As Rush’s digital partner, CentreTEK provides ongoing strategy, creative, and technical consulting services on a regular basis. We our currently helping Rush execute a number of integrated marketing campaigns and digital initiatives.

Rush University Medical Center - www.Rush.edu
CentreTEK Solutions – www.CentreTEK.com

Why Drupal was chosen

  • Open source with no software licensing costs.
  • Scalable framework that easily integrates with other systems.
  • Supported by a large, active developer community.
  • Vendor neutral —there are hundreds of well qualified
    companies to choose from.
  • Widely used and proven
Drupal Hospital Website - Rush University Medical Center

Technical Specifications

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Custom theme and some custom module development. The community modules we selected are well documented and supported. Probably the most important module we used was Entity Reference and some associated bits and pieces to link together the different pieces of content (departments, tests & treatments, etc.). This type of content cross promotion through a centralized taxonomy is critical for a site like this.

We’re also making a lot of use out of the Display Suite module to provide different ways of styling and presenting nodes in different contexts - whether something is included as a featured item, an excerpt, a full entry, etc.