WebMD Ignite

WebMD Ignite is the only full-service, healthcare-specific growth partner for health organizations, healthcare professionals, providers, and payers. By connecting at every touchpoint along their journey—from Discovery to Recovery—they help guide people to better health. With their mission to drive personalization and champion education, they are transforming the healthcare ecosystem.

In an exciting development, WebMD Ignite acquired Healthwise’s operating assets, creating an industry-leading healthcare growth and engagement platform. This acquisition strengthens WebMD Ignite’s position as a leader in patient education, serving more than 650 healthcare organizations.

Powering Healthwise’s content management solutions, we at Kontent.ai are excited to be part of WebMD Ignite’s story, their growth, and the new chapter. In this success story, we’ll take a look at WebMD Ignite’s journey to greater efficiency and control with a flexible platform that freed up their teams from technical complexities, with insights from Sara Green, Tara Records, and Christopher Hess.

The search for a flexible CMS to empower innovation 

Healthwise by WebMD Ignite saw an opportunity to rethink their content management approach to better support their unique content manufacturing and omnichannel delivery needs. The previous system didn’t fully align with their specific use case—as Tara Records, Director of Integration & Translation at WebMD Ignite, shared: “We don’t simply push to websites; we have this whole content manufacturing and these omnichannel deliveries that really required us to have a solution that was more headless.” 

In addition, their existing system, while configurable, needed extensive engineering support to maintain document type definitions (DTDs) and schemas, making even small updates complex and time-consuming. DTDs are essentially the rules that define the structure and elements within a document, while schemas specify how those elements are related. This made experimenting more difficult, and launching new content often meant navigating layers of transformation code, increasing the risk of errors. 

WebMD Ignite recognized that to move forward, they needed a scalable solution that would help them encourage innovation and allow them to deliver fresh, engaging, and accurate content across multiple channels. They also wanted a flexible system that would help them reduce engineering bottlenecks and empower content developers and engineers to work more efficiently.  

Tara noted, “Our first mantra was, how do we bring joy back to our developers’ lives? So that would be not only the content developers but also engineers. But the ultimate goal is, how do we get new things to our clients?” 

The right fit for a unique digital content provider 

As WebMD Ignite explored possible solutions, Kontent.ai stood out. It aligned well with their needs: a headless CMS that could meet strict accreditation standards while seamlessly delivering content across multiple channels beyond a traditional website. “And that’s how we ended up with Kontent.ai; it ticked most of the boxes,” Tara shared.

WebMD Ignite differs from most digital content providers, which typically rely on SEO-driven, traffic-based monetization. Instead, they operate on a client-based, subscription-driven model where hospitals, healthcare providers, and other organizations pay for access to their medically accredited content. This means their content isn’t just consumed on websites—it’s prescribed as part of medical care, integrated into electronic medical records (EMRs), and even broadcasted on hospital TV screens.

Sara Green, VP of Content Operations & AI Innovation at WebMD Ignite, noted: “There has to be as little friction in the delivery as possible because we’re a client-based model of content.” The content must also be delivered at the quality and variety the clients expect.

Kontent.ai allowed them to fully embrace content reuse, meaning they could create a piece of content once and reuse it in multiple places across different channels without having to recreate it again each time. The platform also enabled them to go a little deeper into componentization, which allowed them to break content down into smaller, reusable parts. This means that their content could be reassembled in different ways depending on the needs of different channels without starting from scratch every time.  

In addition, the platform seamlessly integrated metadata from Healthwise by WebMD Ignite’s taxonomy system. This integration allowed them to preserve their existing categorization system while still benefiting from a modern headless CMS. The impact was transformative, as Christopher Hess, Product Manager at WebMD Ignite, explained: “The ability to push these various paradigms of content through multiple output formats through [Kontent.ai] just kind of blew the world open and created possibilities that we didn’t have before.”

Reducing the time it takes to get content published from months to minutes

Over the years, WebMD Ignite transitioned through a number of systems, each introducing its complexities. Constraints in their old models made content creation difficult and slowed down engineering work. Moving to Kontent.ai is having a major impact.

By simplifying their content structure and reducing duplicative and overlapping code, they are significantly lowering the cognitive load on content developers while eliminating redundant engineering work. This means that content teams can now focus their time, energy, and efforts on creating informative, accurate content and delivering it to patients and the community. In addition, because they can now make adjustments without relying on developers, it frees up the developers to focus on higher-value work.

Instead of waiting months to publish content, Healthwise by WebMD Ignite can now see results in a day or less. Additionally, Kontent.ai’s intuitive and user-friendly interface allows users to create new content items (articles) and put them together quickly because they know exactly what to do.

“It seems like a little thing, but being able to produce visually beautiful content, not just a wall of words, is huge. There were times when it was over a year before we were able to get something out successfully. And now, like I said, it’s so much faster,” Tara pointed out.

Tasks that once took several hours to complete in their old system—assuming the content was already created—now take just 10–30 minutes in Kontent.ai, allowing teams to work more efficiently.

Productive collaboration in an easy-to-use editor  

Kontent.ai’s simplicity is also making it easier for the WebMD Ignite team to create content without the need for external tools. “We’ve been showing [the team] how you can create [content] directly in the system, and it’s really easy to do,” Tara shared, highlighting the intuitive editor that makes it easy for everyone to use, even those who were previously more comfortable with traditional tools.

The team emphasized the commenting capabilities as a great tool that more and more people are starting to use. They see it playing an even bigger role in their workflows moving forward, making collaboration even more seamless.

In terms of their workflows, one key focus now is the introduction of a “ready to publish” step, which will serve as a clear signal that content is finalized and also act as a trigger for automatic translation.

Accommodating key standards in content management

Change can be tough but, ultimately, worth it. With Kontent.ai, WebMD Ignite is able to introduce a new level of clarity to their operations, making the content structure more visible and accessible for those creating content rather than hidden within the system.

Because of how the model is set up, content developers can be confident that important content standards are met, like accessibility for titles and subtitles—an area that required much more attention in the past. The content model allows for the reuse of elements such as titles, ensuring consistency and reducing the need for repetitive adjustments.

This structured approach is also enabling other initiatives, such as another WebMD Ignite project, already in progress. As Tara noted, “It’s going to allow us to easily accommodate the upcoming Ignite model, while still allowing us to maintain our structured content model, which would have been really difficult in the other system.”

Leveraging flexibility to scale with ease

Kontent.ai’s flexibility has also made a significant difference. WebMD Ignite can now maintain their structured content model while also accommodating new formats, which is something that would have required a lot more work in the old system.

This level of flexibility has made scaling much easier, particularly as they continue to expand their content across more channels and languages. Currently, they support 20+ languages, with plans to accommodate additional ones as they integrate more content. They also anticipate the need for more languages as they introduce custom content.

Fortunately, Kontent.ai allows them to scale with ease.

Helping healthcare organizations create seamless health experiences

Already working on another project with Kontent.ai, the WebMD Ignite team is focused on revolutionizing the healthcare ecosystem, ensuring that everyone gets the right information at the right time for better health outcomes. From helping people discover important health information to supporting them through recovery, they make sure everyone has access to the content they need at every stage of their health journey.

Looking ahead, WebMD Ignite is now even better equipped to further scale their efforts, reaching even more people with informative content in more languages and formats.