Kaiser Permanente
Overview
Kaiser Permanente is one of the largest nonprofit healthcare plans in the United States. It operates 39 hospitals and more than 700 medical offices, with over 300,000 personnel, including more than 80,000 physicians and nurses. Its millions of members, largely belonging to Large Group Employers, are diverse in their needs, locations, and outlooks. Developing a visionary digital presence to serve each member with their own health needs, including customized plans to employees, is an ongoing challenge, but one where the impact is urgent and immeasurable. Many consider their digital experiences to simply be the ‘look and feel’ or the interface of what they are viewing. But the experience has frameworks, foundations, and platforms that enable everything at the surface. Kaiser needed an overhaul on how it managed asset management, business units, compliance, and multiple stakeholders. They needed to allow third party management of public-facing web properties, including multiple regional and national business units, while ensuring strict security and reliability standards were in place. Digital asset management needed to be consolidated across multiple websites. And in addition to strict ADA and brand compliance, they needed to support multiple stakeholders during the critical open enrollment period.
We utilized our Design Thinking-based approach to precisely understand and define the challenges and motivations for each audience and then ideate, prototype & test solutions. As part of our site re-platforming, we implemented a modern CMS stack to meet IT & Security requirements while also empowering our client stakeholders with more self-management than they had previously. As part of this, we designed page components rather than stand-alone pages that allowed the client to custom assemble content without restrictions. We also implemented a global information architecture that can span across all sites, or only specific sites, depending on client requirements and wishes. And strict ADA & brand guides provided a toolkit for the UI that we leveraged to inform final designs.
Kaiser represents such a large and complex network of patients, staff, facilities, and partners – that each site has a different set of KPIs. Working with the client, we were able to help set specific objectives for each site and its varied audiences. This allowed for the necessary scale to serve its broad base of audience. To achieve that scale, although we started with a limited number of microsites, it was crucial to lay the groundwork to consolidate future sites on this platform in the future and segment out permissions based on strict InfoSec requirements.
An eye toward scale also meant ensuring content was simple to update – in ways that don’t require code, and cannot break the site. Because the client has an existing MarTech stack, integration was crucial to enable the requisite passing of hidden information to ensure leads reached the correct internal business units. And finally, the platform had best-in-class performance, accessibility, and SEO scores (based on Google Lighthouse tests).
