The Patient Experience

The Patient Experience section of the massgeneral.org/cancer website is the first point of contact and guidance for new and prospective patients and their family members. This project’s goal was to fundamentally redesign this portal to increase access and present the center as an environment of supportive care.

In this case study I demonstrate how I established the needs of potential visitors to this portal, the process I went through to outline the structure of the site, the development of an integrated supportive care microsite, and the Adwords campaign that launched with this new portal.

Planning (The Patient Experience)

nckprkr

This microsite was created to streamline the initial information given to new patients at the Mass General Hospital Cancer Center.

The previous version of the site had minimal information, and was positioned largely as a promotional tool for the Cancer Center. The older version was also flash based, so not mobile ready or well scored in SEO terms.

My development plan therefore called for a solution which could act as an elegant and simple working tool so that new and prospective patients could find practically useful information.

It was also important to recognize that visitors to this area of the site might be in a particularly stressed or anxious state, given a recent diagnosis. The more clarity I could add to their experience of this microsite the better, as it might help to alleviate some degree of their stress as they contemplate their first visit.

Content Development and IA (The Patient Experience)

nckprkr
The Patient Experience

The Patient Experience

The new Patient Experience microsite which I developed re-imagined the key elements of the needs of patients and family members.

It offers an easy-to-navigate set of elements which I developed employing a “foyer” model, with clearly accessible “doors” to each interior page.

The portal includes pre-appointment checklists and FAQs, integrative therapy services, other support like financial counseling, and patient education resources.

It’s also headed with a welcome video, which includes a tour of the cancer center’s layout, so it would be less intimidating for first time visitors.

 

Supportive Care Services (The Patient Experience)

nckprkr
Supportive care program listings

Supportive Care Program Listings

Online coverage of the Cancer Center’s many supportive care programs was both sporadic and siloed. Broadening the scope of the Patient Experience project’s initial goal, to improve online information about our location and new patient induction process, I devised and built out a new section of the micro-site which integrated these disparate elements of supportive care into a directory of programs in integrative therapies and support groups.

There was also a major operational challenge to keep an up-to-date calendar of these many programs. Prior to my arrival, only PDF print pieces had been available, updated on a bi-monthly basis.

The Support Services Calendar

Embedded Support Services Calendar

 

I created a new operational process to feed group listings into a shared Gcal, which I then embedded onto the Cancer Center’s main site. This allowed group leaders to record and amend their own schedule in a dynamic form, without the delays of assembling a print listing, while also adding the Gcal’s many access, sharing and printing features to the online experience.

Social Media Campaign (The Patient Experience)

nckprkr

Screen shot 2014-11-24 at 2.08.06 PMAs our online “front door”, the Patient Experience microsite is the key portal for new and prospective patients at the Cancer Center. It was developed to be a crucial element of our patient accessibility features, and, as a means to communicate an approachable message about the Center’s mission, it is closely aligned with our social media activities.

Over the last 18 month, employing both traditional posts and a campaign of promoted posts, I have grown the Mass General Cancer Center’s Facebook page more than five fold. I also launched our Twitter channel to match the kick-off of our wider national awareness campaign, and it has gained a significant and accelerating following within the cancer care social media community.

This growth has been led by campaign and community blog posts and tweets, which are timed to match high traffic periods, with calls for follower engagement in response to prompts like “Tell us what’s everyday amazing in your life”. A post like this always runs with YouTube channel responses embedded on a dedicated the blog channel devoted to our Everyday Amazing national awareness marketing campaign.

To avoid fatigue from saturating our social media community with these postings, they have been interspersed with a wide variety of other content, which I have created to fit a schedule which covers multiple internal teams’ promotional needs. These include fundraising events, staff awards and achievements, and cancer related news from around the center and beyond.

By diversifying our social media offerings, I have been able to allow the Center to break down the barrier between its traditional website and its inbound marketing channels.