BJC

The Client

BJC is one of the largest nonprofit healthcare organizations in the United States and is focused on delivering services to residents primarily in the greater St. Louis and southern Illinois regions. With net revenues of $5.5 billion, BJC serves the healthcare needs of urban, suburban, and rural communities and includes 14 hospitals and multiple community health locations. Services include inpatient and outpatient care, primary care, community health and wellness, workplace health, home health, community mental health, rehabilitation, long-term care, and hospice.

As a nonprofit healthcare organization, BJC is the largest provider of charity care, unreimbursed care, and community benefit in Missouri, providing more than $872.4 million in financial assistance, education of health professionals, safety-net services, and community outreach programs in 2020. 

The Situation

BJC had three core business objectives to address in its digital strategy:

• Growth: Directly support its new brand strategy and support its market position as the premier integrated hospital and care provider network
• Risk management: Modernize the digital technology stack with a flexible, composable architecture so that 35 disparate, at-risk technology platforms could be sunset, leading to reduced technology debt and mitigating platform-related risks
• Customer experience: Strengthen its focus on consumer and patient needs by creating a more search-friendly, mobile accessible, and organized site centered on critical user tasks related to scheduling appointments, finding a doctor, and supporting a healthier life

The Challenge

BJC required cross-functional governance and an updated operating model focused on market-driven innovation — one that decoupled the digital experience and empowered digital marketing team members to accelerate the go-to-market timeline. The new website would take a headless, API-first, microservices, and cloud-native approach. Since the headless technology and composable approach were new to BJC, the team faced change management concerns.

The Solution

BJC tapped NYC-based VShift as its digital partner, and VShift kicked off the project with stakeholder, consumer, and patient feedback sessions, design workshops, and reviews of historical CX findings.

With support from a cross-functional leadership team, VShift created a digital strategy and co-developed a corresponding prototype to articulate the vision for the future site ecosystem. The team adopted a consumer-first approach, putting this audience's most critical needs at the heart of the site's information architecture, user interface, and utilities. They focused on simplifying essential tasks like finding care, scheduling a visit, learning more about clinical topics, and engaging within the community.

VShift's governance and co-development operating model helped the team overcome change management concerns about the modern web approach with headless and composable technologies, as well as the accelerated sprint schedule.

The Results

VShift’s approach propelled the project forward in record time – just four months from kick-off to production. Though just launched, the Acquia Cloud Platform-hosted site's page views and unique visitors have more than doubled. Increased BJC.org traffic and time on site have resulted in 20% more scheduled appointments and clinical inquiries. The revamp helped BJC better differentiate its brand, showcasing its focus on innovation and meeting the diverse healthcare needs of its online population through BJC.org. 

Additionally, thanks to Acquia Cloud Edge, the teams were able to effectively address security vulnerabilities associated with the older legacy sites. And since launch, consumer and internal employee feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The project’s decoupled digital experience foundation now enables innovation throughout the organization and other high-visibility programs are using the common foundation to go to market.