UCLA Health

The Client

UCLA Health supports a community of more than 670,000 patients across a diverse collective of four hospitals, 250 clinics, and thousands of distinguished physicians, nurses, and administrative staff.

The Situation

UCLA Health’s primary goal for its new website was to deliver an exceptional, more engaging patient experience that allowed site visitors to find health-related information and book appointments easily. Additional objectives included strengthening UCLA Health’s reputation as a world-class healthcare system and differentiating it by emphasizing its focus on research and innovation.

The Challenge

To provide a more cohesive, consistent experience for visitors and content editors, UCLA Health needed to consolidate its 250 separate subsites into one integrated experience platform. Other challenges included improving the accuracy of search results and integrating with third-party data sources that would provide a single source of truth of information related to care providers, locations, and clinical trials.

The Solution

UCLA Health tapped global consulting firm Slalom as its digital partner, and Slalom kicked off the project with stakeholder and patient interviews, workshops, and reviews of survey responses. Based on its findings, Slalom prepared user journey maps, prototypes, and wireframes. The teams adopted a customer-first approach, putting the patient experience at the heart of the site’s information architecture, design, and user interface. They also focused on making it easy to find a doctor and make an appointment, as they knew it would help drive customer engagement.

Acquia Cloud Platform’s powerful and reliable features, including deployment tooling, caching, on-demand environments, and managed Solr search instances, facilitate consistent deployment processes while minimizing the need for platform engineering resources. This has resulted in faster delivery of new features and shorter production release cycles. And Acquia Cloud Edge’s sophisticated routing, CDN, WAF, and cloud-level caching was critical to allowing complex traffic negotiation and routing between the new and legacy platforms.

The Results

With patient needs at the heart of the rebuild, the launch of the new website led to a 482% increase in online appointment requests, a 12% increase in self-scheduled appointments, a 26% increase in visitors to the site, and a 50% increase in online search results brand visibility.