National children's healthcare organization

A nationally ranked acute pediatric care organization and a leader in life-saving health discoveries—pioneering treatments for leukemia, heart surgery, and more since 1901—partnered with Horizontal to update, redesign, and implement a revamped site. 

Over the years, their business needs had changed, and their aging Drupal platform had become unsupported. Patient families, donors, researchers, and the community were struggling to access the programs and services they needed on the client’s website. On top of it all, the pandemic made modernizing their web experience an even greater priority as digital surged to the forefront of patient experiences.

Transitioning from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10, Horizontal didn’t simply upgrade their old site; we envisioned an enhanced way to accelerate their business value through faster, more connected experiences. Our team needed to rethink the site architecture and build a fresh site that matched both their current and evolving needs—all while ensuring compliance with HIPAA and other legal guidelines.    

This meant we needed to solve four key challenges:  

• Transform their site as a business generating tool 
  
  
• Establish user journeys and content hierarchy 
  
  
• Streamline the content management process 
  
  
• Implement consistent measurement and analytics to track success 

 

Horizontal started by providing in-depth roadmaps and expert recommendations to address gaps in user experience, SEO, and content strategy. Some of the recommendations included improvements such as... 

• Custom dimensions for Google Analytics reporting insights 
  
  
• Data layer implementation to house user information 
  
  
• More organized navigation structure and naming conventions
  
  
• Enabling easier management of price transparency documents, as well as removing outdated embedded scripts for compliance purposes
   

Their content workflow and user experience required simplification by creating reusable components and a faster editorial process, all while maintaining publication control. Additionally, we transformed their content structure from a group of disconnected pages to an organized content hub for easier patient family use.  

With hundreds of medical programs and services pages, keeping this information easy to sustain and scale was key. Horizontal simplified the site’s complex code footprint and reduced the amount of maintenance slowing down their team as we migrated the hospital’s site to the latest version of Drupal.