The Client
As New York State’s largest healthcare provider and private employer, Northwell Health’s mission is to improve the health of its communities, and is focused on prevention, wellness, and providing the full continuum of diagnosis, treatment and after-care services to the patients it serves. Northwell is also pioneering discoveries at its Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, and supporting education at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell and School of Graduate Nursing and Physician Assistant Studies, and supporting innovation through Northwell Ventures.

The Situation
Northwell Health wanted to reimagine how it builds and extends its evolving brand consistently across its digital properties. With a growing network of 23 hospitals, about 600 outpatient facilities, and a number of digital teams, maintaining brand integrity across their digital ecosystem is a constant challenge and a top priority. Northwell was challenged with numerous brand and UX inconsistencies, and wanted to establish a clear way to help its digital teams create web content within brand guidelines.

The Challenge
The objectives of the Northwell Health Design Standards Initiative was twofold; the first was to empower Northwell Health’s digital teams to create new content and secondly to devise a way to maintain brand integrity across the platform of multiple hospitals and department websites.

Creating consistent and accessible design and UX across large organizations presents a number of logistical complications. Northwell Health not only recognized the value of consistent design to provide the best user experience possible for its patients, but also realized the importance of investing in tools to make consistency achievable for their many digital marketing teams and vendors.

The Solution
In order to standardize Northwell Health’s digital presence, Phase2 worked with Northwell to create a consolidated library of design elements and components. These designs were built out into a comprehensive digital style guide giving all of the Northwell Health digital content teams easy-to-use, standardized, and flexible brand elements. The style guide makes it simple for Northwell Health to maintain a consistent look and feel across all of their healthcare sites and services. This work was the basis for Northwell Health’s Drupal 8 replatforming. The replatforming was implemented in a gradual manner allowing the former Drupal 7 platform to run existing sites in parallel, while new sites were being created with the new design library.

The Results
The design standards initiative allowed Northwell to expand their digital design team from three digital designers to a team of more than 50 people who were empowered to work with clients to pull together digital experiences without the aid of developers. The Acquia Platform allowed Northwell to gradually migrate thair sites from their old Drupal 7 platform to Drupal 8 gradually while running both platforms concurrently.