Connecticut Children's

The Client

Connecticut Children’s is a prominent, specialized pediatric health system and the only one in Connecticut solely dedicated to the care of children. Its core mission is to improve access to and delivery of high-quality healthcare for pediatric patients, spanning from prenatal care through adulthood.

The health system provides comprehensive care across 30+ pediatric specialities and operates from more than 30 locations throughout Connecticut, Eastern New York, and Western Massachusetts. Connecticut Children’s is a major regional employer, with a workforce exceeding 3,000 professionals, including physicians, nurses, researchers, and administrative staff.

Connecticut Children’s primary customers are pediatric patients and their families across its service region. The organization also serves as a critical resource for referring physicians and healthcare partners who rely on its specialized expertise and research capabilities. The organization actively pursues breakthrough research and community partnerships as part of its commitment to advancing pediatric wellness.

The Situation

Connecticut Children's continues to grow and innovate, with a strong focus on digital transformation, patient-centered care, and expanding access to services. The organization is consistently recognized for clinical excellence, research, and community engagement. But as the healthcare system has grown, it needed a more sophisticated digital infrastructure to keep pace with evolving requirements. Additionally, it needed to improve its delivery of seamless online experiences for families seeking pediatric care.

The organization was using separate hosting and digital asset management systems — a fragmented approach that created inefficiencies across teams and made it difficult to maintain consistent brand messaging.

With a backlog of unfulfilled digital projects, Connecticut Children's technology leadership recognized that things had to change. The system needed a partner with proven healthcare digital transformation expertise who could migrate its platform and provide ongoing strategic guidance to help Connecticut Children’s achieve its long-term goals.

The Challenge

Connecticut Children's faced numerous challenges that threatened to limit its digital capabilities.

Security and compliance: As a healthcare provider, ensuring its systems had the robust protections necessary for an organization handling sensitive patient information was of the utmost importance. Connecticut Children's needed a partner who could offer consistent processes and communication — especially to clearly and effectively convey project plans to the executive leadership team.

"One of our biggest challenges was ensuring that our leadership team felt completely confident in the transition," said Christina Di Bona, Marketing Director at Connecticut Children's. "It was vital to demonstrate that the move to Acquia was secure, with protections like Cloudflare and the appropriate security settings already in place."

Fragmented digital infrastructure: The organization managed multiple disconnected systems, requiring relationships with numerous vendors and creating operational inefficiencies. Its digital asset management was disconnected from its content management system, making it hard for teams to manage and deploy media assets efficiently. This disconnect increased costs and complexity while slowing the ability to launch new digital initiatives.

Accessibility gaps: Accessibility was also a major concern, but the organization didn’t have the expertise to identify and address compliance issues fully. Without comprehensive auditing capabilities, Connecticut Children's couldn't be sure its digital properties served all patients and families, including those using assistive technologies like screen readers.

Platform transition growing pains: Beyond the technical challenges, the organization faced typical growing pains associated with switching digital asset management platforms. "Content owners had to adjust to new processes and workflows, understand which asset management functionalities had changed — both what was lost and what was gained — and adapt accordingly. The transition required extensive testing to ensure asset tagging, retrieval, and publishing worked as expected and to minimize disruption to marketing and creative workflows," explained Di Bona.

Backlog of digital improvements: When Connecticut Children's began exploring solutions, it had accumulated a significant backlog of unfulfilled digital projects due to technological limitations of its existing platform. The website needed enhancements, including upgraded tab experiences for more straightforward navigation, optimization of underutilized page space, improved form functionality, and better analytics tools to track performance and increase conversions. Without a clear path forward and the right partner, these improvements would continue languishing.

The Solution

To address these challenges, Connecticut Children's partnered with Acquia partner, Modea, a digital agency specializing in healthcare transformation, to implement a comprehensive solution built on a secure, enterprise-grade content management framework and Acquia's enterprise platform.

Selecting the right technology partner

Modea was instrumental in guiding Connecticut Children’s on how to leverage an open-source content management system and Acquia effectively. "They demonstrated their success with similar-sized clients and showcased how open-source CMS flexibility, paired with Acquia's enterprise-grade platform, could meet our specific needs. Critically, Modea also helped ensure that security controls and compliance measures remained current and up-to-date as part of our ongoing platform service. Their experience and track record gave our team confidence that this was the right solution," said Di Bona.

Establishing modern, secure infrastructure

A key objective was establishing a modern, secure, compliant web application infrastructure. This included setting up dedicated development, staging, and production environments and implementing robust monitoring tools. The Modea team modernized Connecticut Children’s web platform, establishing a foundation for ongoing updates to keep the system secure, compliant, and aligned with future technology advancements.

Modea prioritized staying current with platform updates that directly support security enhancements. Cloudflare was implemented as an added layer of protection to help prevent threats like cross-site scripting and data injection attacks.

Comprehensive accessibility audit and remediation

Modea conducted an accessibility audit to identify critical, major, and minor issues, then prioritized issues for resolution. The audit revealed that specific assistive tools like screen readers weren't functioning correctly. Modea addressed these issues to ensure a more inclusive and accessible user experience. The team also slightly adjusted the website’s brand colors to improve readability and meet accessibility standards.

Consolidating digital asset management

To reduce costs and streamline operations, Modea consolidated the web application infrastructure by transitioning from the previous digital asset management system to Acquia DAM. The move brought all media management tools under one unified platform, making it significantly easier to manage assets across teams. The consolidation not only improved operational efficiency but also proved to be more cost-effective by eliminating the need for multiple, disconnected systems.

Creating repeatable components for speed

To accelerate site launches, Modea built repeatable components and templates that streamlined development and improved consistency across pages. On mobile, the team repositioned tab controls to thumb level and added directional arrows, making it easier for users to navigate content. Additionally, Modea’s improvements to the tab experience led to faster load times and a more seamless user experience overall.

The Results

The partnership between Connecticut Children's, Modea, and Acquia has delivered measurable improvements across multiple dimensions — from user engagement and operational efficiency to cost savings and team satisfaction. Since implementing Acquia Cloud Platform, Connecticut Children's has seen consistent growth in key performance metrics:

• User growth: Total users for the main domain increased by 5.8%
• Session growth: Sessions increased by 8.5% on the main domain
• Improved engagement: Page time increased by 1.5%
   

These improvements demonstrate that the enhanced user experience, faster load times, and improved accessibility resonate with families seeking pediatric care.

The initial project implementation took roughly three months. More impressively, the ongoing deployment process has proven highly reliable. Thus far this fiscal year, Modea has completed 24 releases.

Enhanced security, efficiency, and cost savings

Consolidating its digital infrastructure has helped Connecticut Children's save costs. Transitioning to Acquia DAM brought all media management tools under one platform, reducing the need for multiple vendors and streamlining workflows across teams. Moving to Acquia Cloud Platform reduced hosting overhead and complexity compared to the previous hosting environment. Standardized deployment processes and a modern infrastructure have also improved efficiency, reducing the time and resources required for maintenance and updates.

By implementing Cloudflare protections, staying current with security updates for their underlying content management system, and establishing proper development, staging, and production environments with robust monitoring, Connecticut Children's has strengthened its security posture. The organization has the infrastructure and processes to maintain compliance with healthcare industry standards while minimizing the risk of security incidents.

Acquia provided a secure, scalable infrastructure and a modern development environment with dedicated staging, development, and production spaces, streamlining updates and maintenance. The platform supports timely upgrades to the content management system, helping Connecticut Children's stay current with security patches and minimize technical debt. The system’s digital properties properly support assistive technologies like screen readers, meaning the organization can confidently serve all pediatric patients and families, regardless of their accessibility needs.

Sustained investment and positive team feedback

The strongest indicator of success is the sustained positive experience and ongoing investment in the platform. "We've continued to invest in the platform through multiple change orders and ongoing enhancements, which reflects our confidence in the solution," said Di Bona. 

Feedback from the marketing team has been overwhelmingly positive. "We are seeing real value in how the site supports our efforts and enables us to work more efficiently. With every release, the site improves, becoming more effective and user-friendly. Our CMS and Acquia have proven to be reliable, scalable, and well-aligned with our evolving needs," Di Bona said.