Challenges
- Time-intensive internal processes of maintaining content in siloes
- Difficulty keeping content consistent across all digital touchpoints
- Innovating to provide patients the best DX on their preferred channels
The University Medical Center Utrecht is the main hospital and medical research center of the city of Utrecht, the Netherlands. With more than 12,000+ employees and 1,000 beds, they aim to take healthcare further, with the guiding principle: “Together, we create the care of tomorrow.”
This focus not only applies to in-person health services, but also to the digital space. For the digital team, being patient-first and future-looking is a reason they turned to Kontent.ai. As their modular content platform of choice, Kontent.ai fits neatly into their tech ecosystem, which includes Microsoft Bot Framework, ReadSpeaker, DeepL, Matomo, and Productboard, to name a few.
The team’s goal? To redesign and modernize the digital patient experience – and in tandem, transform their way of working. Underpinning the project was an updated approach to digital content management.
The challenge of siloed operations
A key component of true digital transformation is unified content. This is what The University Medical Center Utrecht (UMCU) saw as their first step. Before, the team maintained siloed operations for websites, patient portals, print materials, and email outreach. Considering they currently run 94 websites with 30 million web requests monthly, this was a cumbersome process.
For the team, maintaining everything separately took a lot of time and resources. This meant there was less time to deliver on innovation to improve external patient touchpoints. For a smaller team, time was something they couldn’t continue trading.
Content consistency was also a key concern. Especially in healthcare, information must be accurate and current. If the journey feels at all disjointed, a patient’s trust in the system is compromised. To deliver on their strategy, UMCU focused on improving the ecosystem of communication touchpoints, while automating processes whenever possible.
Serving content from a single hub
Driving the project forward was the belief that the patient should be in control. UMCU wanted to provide patients with 24/7 insight and clear information on their preferred channels. This principle informed all activities related to the website experience and patient portal.
UMC turned to data to identify patterns of patient engagement, understanding what was useful and useable on the current patient journey. User journey mapping and heat map analysis helped them make the right call when developing personalized healthcare paths.
To support patients’ channel preferences, they also needed to unify their content and streamline internal processes. Kontent.ai made the difference, from both a business and technical perspective. Structuring their content in the modular content platform made it easier for teams to publish and update content for all touchpoints, while centralizing collaboration in the user-friendly authoring hub made content creation much more efficient.
“We use Kontent.ai as a central source of content for editors. From here, we refer to other systems, such as HiX patient portal. The increase in efficiency by using a central source for content is one of the growth measurements that we have aimed at the organization,” said Kirsten Goede, Product Owner Digital Experience at at UMC Utrecht. “In addition, patient information can easily be offered digitally, making it more relevant and up to date.”
To achieve what they set out to do, automation also played a role in their success. With Kontent.ai’s SaaS model, the team benefited from no-downtime deployments, automated regression testing and backups.
Putting patient feedback front and center
Patient-centricity is all about bringing the human touch to all experiences. In part, this means providing patients the right information at the right time – no more, as to flood them, and no less, as to worry them. UMC websites, along with the digital patient portal, chatbot experiences, and narrowcasting strategies were redesigned to deliver on this goal. One improvement highlights the human approach: no more anonymous caller ID to patients.
Additionally, direct feedback from patients on specific pieces of content can be accessed by a content author with an integrated custom element. With this insight accessible right in the team’s workspace, authors can easily adjust copy to be clearer and more useful.
The central source of truth they have created in Kontent.ai not only allows them to serve and support patients, but also eases labor-intensive internal processes. A win for everyone involved.
