The Client
Perficient is a full-service, AI-first digital consultancy that partners with healthcare organizations to solve some of the industry's toughest digital experience problems. Robert Higgins, a Solutions Architect at Perficient, works at the intersection of clinical data systems and the patient-facing web experiences built on top of them.
The Situation
Perficient's healthcare clients needed the same thing: a way to turn internal, compliance-driven data into something patients could genuinely use and find. Perficient's job was to make that possible, connecting provider and credentialing systems to a patient-facing website, delivering high-resolution and accessible provider imagery at scale, and letting patients search using natural, everyday language instead of clinical terms.
Just as often, it meant giving clients' marketing teams the ability to shape the front end themselves without having to wait on developers; consolidating fragmented, department-run websites onto one governed platform; and prototyping and launching new experiences quickly for clients of every size.
"This used to take someone 15 minutes daily that they had to do. Now it takes them two minutes." -- Robert Higgins, Solutions Architect, Perficient
The Challenge
Healthcare organizations commonly approach Perficient while running an outdated CMS or DXP, struggling with migrations that never quite finished. And healthcare data was never built with patients in mind. Provider records, credentialing systems, and clinical detail live inside platforms designed for human resources and compliance, not for someone trying to find a doctor. Provider bios go missing, service descriptions run thin, and photos come through low quality. The information is accurate, but it is not ready for a patient to read.
Compounding the problem, healthcare organizations often rely on hundreds of credentialing systems, many built in-house as one-off APIs with no standard way to connect to a modern web platform. Departments spin up their own sites independently, with no shared governance. Marketing teams wait in vendor queues to make basic front-end changes, and simple editorial tasks eat up staff time every single day.
The Solution
Perficient built its approach around Acquia Source and the broader Acquia stack, using an open foundation to connect data that most platforms could not reach. Provider and credential data flows into a Drupal instance on Acquia Cloud Platform, giving Perficient's team a stable, governed base to build on.
- High-resolution imagery: Acquia DAM delivers web-ready provider images with governance built in for accessibility.
- Patient-friendly search: Acquia Search, powered by SearchStax, overlays marketing-friendly language on clinical terminology, so patients search using the words they naturally use.
- Direct API connections: Acquia Source's open-source foundation lets Perficient connect directly to the hundreds of one-off credentialing APIs healthcare organizations already run, including major systems like Epic and Verge.
- Rapid site consolidation: Acquia Source, used as a rapid prototyping tool, gives Perficient a fast path to consolidate dozens of departmental WordPress sites onto a single governed platform.
Because the foundation is open, marketing teams can shape the front-end experience themselves, without waiting on a developer queue for every change.
The Results
Work that used to take 15 minutes a day now takes two: an 87% cut in daily editorial effort. Patients find providers more easily, with higher search engagement now that clinical terms are translated into everyday language. Accessibility is stronger across provider imagery, governed directly through Acquia DAM.
For Higgins, who came up through a development background and has since moved into a leadership role, the shift has been personally rewarding as well: he now sees far more direct engagement with clients, and finds real satisfaction in watching outcomes like the 15-to-2-minute change play out.
Looking ahead, Higgins sees Acquia Source's rapid prototyping strength as a path to bring even more fragmented departmental sites under one governed platform, giving Perficient a repeatable model to apply across healthcare clients of every size.
"I'm seeing Source as a great add-on for those customers as well as a rapid prototyping tool... and now I'm seeing a small part of a much bigger picture." -- Robert Higgins, Solutions Architect, Perficient