Headquartered just north of Chicago, NorthShore University HealthSystem is a comprehensive, fully integrated, healthcare delivery system that serves the greater North Shore and northern Illinois communities. The $2.1 billion healthcare system includes more than 140 locations and employs more than 900 primary and specialty care physicians. NorthShore also provides teaching opportunities through affiliation with the University of Chicago.
The Challenge
Northshore relied on their website to deliver timely and relevant information to their patients and staff, but their aging content management system (CMS) presented issues for developers, CMS editors, and site visitors.
Northshore required a content management system that was easier to use and a redesigned, newly developed site that would provide a better user experience and increase engagement with their community.
Optimizely Migration
Migrating from Ektron to Optimizely involved over 6000 content items, including templates, SmartForms, media, images, and other assets. To streamline this process, Adage built a custom exporting tool to pull data from Ektron and merge it with the new Optimizely implementation. A custom redirect manager was also implemented to maintain all links within the CMS’s content blocks.
The migration to Optimizely drastically increased Northshore’s site speed for visitors and site administrators. Optimizely’s intuitive user interface and Adage-created custom templates improved CMS editor flexibility and efficiency. These combined allowed Northshore to bring more maintenance work in-house and decreased the need for 3rd party developers by more than 50%.
Increased Site Visitor Engagement
Adage addressed visitor engagement by launching two new site features. A community section with forum and blogs allows registered patients to share their experiences and engage with the community. Adage also redesigned the Clinical Services and Conditions pages throughout the site allowing each specialty the ability to update this information directly removing the responsibility from the digital group. This resulted in direct from the experts, higher quality content for patients.
The award-winning site offered site visitors an improved user experience and because the redevelopment project included responsive design the Northshore community can access the site on ANY device.
Hosting and Managed Services
NorthShore has relied on Adage to be their hosting provider for almost a decade. This effort included a move to Microsoft Azure and AdageCare.
For many organizations, simply getting to the cloud is not enough. It takes a Microsoft Azure certified partner that understands the mechanics and scalability to monitor and manage a cloud environment to be a critical success. NorthShore elected to have Adage to provide managed services for its website hosting solution which includes backup management, monitoring, and scaling.
Adage Technologies has become a critical extension of my staff. On every new project, their team steps up with guidance, development expertise, and creative solutions to the challenges we face. Adage Technologies is a true business partner.
Check out our other work
Optimizely Integration Enhances Ecommerce for Spartan Chemical
