“Geonetric and their VitalSite CMS have delivered exactly what a dynamic health system like NMHS needs. Their team was thoughtful and strategic, helping us navigate big organizational change and balance the needs of our system with our patients. VitalSite CMS delivers impressive functionality and scalability out of the box, something our system needs today and in the future. And best of all, it’s easy enough to use that our entire team has the confidence and ability to make changes and keep our site up to date.”
Marsha Tapscott, Director of Marketing and Public Relations
North Mississippi Health Services
Like most healthcare organizations face at one time or another, North Mississippi Health Services (NMHS) had outgrown their web presence. Not only was it not responsive, but it was also too focused on their flagship hospital North Mississippi Medical Center in Tupelo, MS. The organization, whose volumes have grown tremendously over the last few years, includes community hospitals in six locations throughout north Mississippi and northwest Alabama, as well as a network of more than 45 primary and specialty clinics. Their site wasn’t adequately presenting the services available at the system level or representing that new brand.
They turned to Geonetric to help them build and design an updated site on a new content management system (CMS) that solved their current user experience issues, and also set the growing system up for success in the future.
Create Unified and Patient-Focused Strategy and Design
Many of NMHS’s goals centered on creating a more patient-friendly web experience that makes it easy for users to navigate the site.
Geonetric’s content strategy team helped the NMHS team bring their user-focused goals to life throughout the entire site. Starting with a content inventory, the team documented every piece of content on the current site, identified gaps and created a plan for the new site.
This in-depth work helped NMHS understand missed opportunities when users can’t see the full breadth of services available at the system level and solidified the benefits of taking a system-centric approach with the new site. From there the team defined primary, secondary and footer navigation using intuitive labeling. They also developed a content matrix to give NMHS detailed, page-by-page guidance and structures to make sure the content on the new site addressed users’ needs.
With an information architecture in place, Geonetric’s design team collaborated with content strategy to build on their foundation with a new, user-focused design. Beginning with a wireframe, the design team was able to map NMHS’s vision with proven design and development best practices.
The responsive design breaks content down thoughtfully on different devices while keeping top transactional conversions at site visitors’ fingertips. It was also important to keep their system brand front and center at every opportunity while adhering to brand guidelines. Working to bring NMHS’s tagline and brand promise of “What connected feels like” to life, our designers thoughtfully selected images that give an immediate feeling of connectivity and warmth.
Increasing online interactions around top transactional paths was also an important objective in the redesign. Content strategy and design worked together to develop eye-catching task navigation that puts top tasks front-and-center, including NMHS’s recent Epic integration.
Support Growth with a Scalable CMS
With VitalSite, the NMHS team has the power of a healthcare-specific CMS at their fingertips, as well as the ability to easily add content, images and different page layouts.
VitalSite’s four core directories helped bring NMHS’s transactional goals to life, offering user-friendly provider, services, locations and calendar directories that interrelated, creating a personalized and intuitive conversion path for visitors regardless of how they navigate the site.
The NMHS team saw VitalSite’s scalability firsthand when just weeks before launch the growing health system acquired a new hospital and clinics that needed to be woven into the site by go-live. Together the teams easily accommodated the new facilities in the information architecture and the provider, locations, and services directories, making the go live date without worry and truly bringing a new, bigger brand to life online.
Deliver Results
Since launch in late February 2019, organic traffic to landing pages has increased by 57%, with most organic users landing in the locations and medical services section. Overall organic page views have increased by 18%, organic clicks in Google have increased by 24% and their average position in Google has improved by 35%.
With 48% of users visiting from a mobile device, the organization was thrilled to see mobile bounce rates decrease by 15%. In fact, they now enjoy mobile bounce rates lower than the industry average.
User engagement is better across the site, as evidenced by a 47% increase in pages per session and a 21% increase in the average session duration.
Redesign Connects Patients to a Growing Health System
