Problem
While a potential patient’s aim might be to simply find a primary care physician nearby, the search process on a health system’s site is often cumbersome and time-consuming. Gundersen understood that healthcare is no exception to these forces. A patient’s digital experience is part of their care journey—that initial contact needs to be emotionally supportive and positive.
Gundersen wanted a long term solution that addressed these challenges. Phase2 partnered with Gundersen to build a digital front door—uniting their disparate platforms into a single, cohesive access point.
Context
Gundersen Heath’s mission is to deliver world-class medical care and the right amount of love. They call it love + medicine and it propels them forward.
Gundersen Health System, a comprehensive non-profit network based in La Crosse, Wisconsin, serves the Upper Midwest through multi-specialty group medical practices, a teaching hospital, regional community clinics, affiliate hospitals, behavioral health services, vision centers, and pharmacies.
Our approach
A Front Door to the Future
Gundersen Health’s ambitions—creating a welcoming, seamless experience that captured their brand identity as an elite medical provider with a neighborhood vibe—made them ideal candidates for a best-in-class digital experience platform (DXP) and a design system that enabled a consistent, branded experience.
The benefits of these tools are many. For consumers, these tools provide the foundation of a great self-service experience. For the Gundersen team, these tools offer a scalable solution that eliminates the manual entry of physician profiles and location information. And with a Kyruus ProviderMatch integration, the platform reduces call center volume—a huge win for both consumers and Gundersen.
Phase2 built a Drupal platform, migrated the existing content, and integrated with Kyruus, a smart search engine that pulls in data sources and creates a searchable, provider directory that can be linked up with an electronic health record (EHR) for open scheduling. We architected an open-source design system to express Gundersen’s unique brand (typography, iconography, color, layout). The new DXP and design system work in tandem—enabling the Gundersen team the independence to create their own brand-safe content and disseminate it quickly and easily.
“Phase2 has been a wonderful partner. Especially the depth of the bench. There were heavy development times with the CMS launch and then there were times where we needed digital strategists and help with analytics and tagging. The ability to flex the expertise to meet our needs has been great.”
Outcome
Gundersen Health’s digital front door initiative has:
- Resulted in a new platform and user experience to compete in the crowded health system landscape
- Provided an easily extensible site that can grow with future needs
- Eased the consumer experience through a unified access point—to ultimately improve the health of their community
Phase2 continues to optimize the Gundersen experience with a visionary consumer-first roadmap and a digital measurement model that prioritizes their initiatives. One area of focus that emerged was the Gundersen careers site. Recruitment in healthcare has become incredibly difficult due to labor shortages and burnout and an aging population is upping the demand. A complicating factor for Gundersen is regional health system competition and national healthcare retailers.
However, Gundersen Health now has the tools and foundation for the future—one that paves the way to accomplishing big initiatives, achieving a more ambitious digital experience for their community, and realizing their love + medicine ideals.
