University of California, San Francisco Department of Surgery

The Client

The Department of Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco is one of the leading surgical departments in the world, with a rich history of scientific, educational, and clinical advancement. Serving patients across six major Bay Area hospitals, UCSF surgeons perform a high volume of technically demanding procedures.

The Situation

The UCSF Department of Surgery had grown into a sprawling digital footprint of 80+ domains spanning research labs, patient-facing sites, and residency programs. Each had been built on a proprietary CMS, with no shared infrastructure, no cohesive navigation between them, and no centralized content strategy.

The Challenge

The lack of a unified platform had compounding consequences:

• Inconsistent experiences: Individual departments were designing their own layouts, navigation, and visual languages—making the web presence feel fragmented and difficult to trust.
• Content dead-ends: Most organic traffic landed on interior pages rather than the homepage, but those pages offered visitors nowhere meaningful to go next. The homepage itself was cluttered with competing links and no clear hierarchy.
• Editorial inefficiency: Content editors had to manually recreate shared information across domains, with no way to reuse or syndicate content.
• No audience alignment: Content didn’t speak clearly to the four key audiences—patients, researchers, potential residents, and faculty—and lacked the accessible, human language that patients and families need when researching care.

UCSF needed a platform that could bring consistency, governance, and editorial efficiency to its entire digital system—without sacrificing the flexibility each lab and program required.

The Solution

The team selected Drupal as the CMS, already in use across much of UCSF, and the right foundation for flexibility and long-term scalability. To manage a digital portfolio of this size, the team deployed on Acquia Cloud Platform, giving UCSF enterprise-grade, fully managed Drupal hosting with the security, uptime, and DevOps automation required for a healthcare institution.

The centerpiece of the multi-site strategy was Drupal. Drupal’s Domain Access suite of modules made it possible to manage the entire portfolio from a single centralized platform—one codebase, one governance model, and one place to push updates across every site. Content that belonged to multiple domains could be shared from a single source of truth, eliminating the duplicative editorial work that had plagued the team under their legacy CMS.

Discovery-Driven Design

UCSF partnered with Acquia partner, Kanopi Studios and conducted seven rounds of interviews with key decision-makers and surfaced the full picture of pain points across all four audience types. Heat mapping, surveys, and analytics research informed every subsequent decision on content, information architecture, and visual design.

High-fidelity prototypes demonstrated how users would move through the new experience, and how animations and micro-interactions would guide attention to the most important content. 

A Flexible Template System for 80+ Sites

Using Drupal Domain Access multi-site architecture, the team built a standardized site template flexible enough to accommodate the full range of UCSF’s domains, from patient-facing department pages to research lab microsites. Each site could swap in its own content and unique elements while inheriting the shared design system, navigation logic, and governance standards from the central platform.

Content was restructured and retitled to surface the right information on the right audience at the right moment. Imagery and video were created specifically to reflect UCSF’s hands-on humanized approach to the patient experience. Softer shapes, transition animations, and micro-interactions added visual depth throughout.

The rollout was planned iteratively: rather than launching all 80+ domains at once, the Department of Surgery prioritized the order, and each site was brought into Drupal in sequence—reducing risk and giving the team time to refine the experience as it scaled.

The Results

The UCSF Department of Surgery now has a unified digital presence—consistent in design, governed centrally through Drupal, and built to grow. Patients can find the information they need without hitting dead-ends. Potential residents are met with content that inspires action. Faculty and clinical researchers can navigate to opportunities without friction.

Editors manage the entire 80+ domain portfolio from a single Acquia platform, with shared content flowing across sites automatically and per-site customization available where it’s needed.

• Drupal provided the unified platform that made managing 80+ sites operationally feasible. Shared content, themes, and code are maintained centrally, while each site retains the flexibility to serve its unique audience. Updates deploy across the entire portfolio from a single location.
• Acquia Cloud Platform gave UCSF a secure, HIPAA-aligned cloud environment with automated workflows, built-in edge security, and the reliability required for a world-class medical institution serving patients across the Bay Area and beyond.
• Authentic photography of UCSF physicians and newly produced videos reflect the real patient experience—moving away from stock imagery toward a more humanized experience.
• As patients increasingly research conditions and providers from their phones, the team built a mobile-first design to ensure accessibility and ease of navigation across all devices.
• The new site meets accessibility requirements across video controls, font sizing, alt text, and color contrast.