The Client
Markham Stouffville Hospital is a progressive, three-site, community hospital with 329 beds, leading diagnostic and emergency services, and clinical programs in acute care medicine and surgery, addictions and mental health, and childbirth and children’s services. Partnering with other specialist providers, the hospital’s 500 physicians, 23 midwives, 2,300 staff, and nearly 1,300 volunteers make it the centre of community care for the residents of the City of Markham and the Towns of Stouffville and Uxbridge.
The Situation
At the centre of Markham Stouffville’s organization is its commitment to reach excellence in communicating with patients, communities, and staff to achieve better, safer, more effective, and less expensive care and wait times – meaning the right care at the right place at the right time at an affordable price. The hospital’s legacy digital platforms weren’t supporting its goals; they struggled with substantial traffic loads, were difficult to edit, and couldn’t deliver a responsive mobile experience. Markham Stouffville Hospital needed to reinvent its online platforms – both public website and intranet, to achieve alignment with strategic goals and to meet digital best practices as a two way communications vehicle with communities it serves. The hospital gathered website user experience input from a broad cross-section of users and reviewing and streamlining content. The hospital also prepared a broader online survey for internal stakeholders to provide feedback on both website and intranet needs.
The Challenge
Digital Echidna’s project with Markham Stouffville Hospital aligned around two strategic objectives: to develop a high-performance organization that fosters a dynamic workplace culture, and to increase accountability and efficiency. The redevelopment of its two digital platforms – website and intranet – would improve the ease with which information can be found, consumed, shared and measured for effectiveness.
The Solution
The client needed a single digital platform with ability to handle site growth, that was future minded with accessibility standards, and mobile first at the core. With Digital Echidna’s recommendation, Markham Stouffville selected Drupal and Acquia Cloud as the platform for its public websites.
The site architecture and the organization of information was restructured on both the website and intranet in order to make it easy to use for all target audiences. There was a detailed discovery phase lead by Digital Echidna, where it was collectively decided what content goes on the site, and how to organize it. For Markham Stouffville intranet, which will launch in 2019, Digital Echidna is using its EchidNET open source social intranet product, purpose-built for the healthcare industry. It has capacity to highlight feature stories, calendar events, social media posts, staff, physician, and patient portals, forms, content organization tools and with registration and payment tools.
The Results
With its new, scalable platform powering both web and intranet experiences, Markham Stouffville Hospital is poised for growth. The project consolidated several systems under a single sign-on and experience, and made it imminently easier to find mission-critical information.