Children’s Hospital & Medical Center Omaha
Making Room To Grow: Children’s Hospital & Medical Center, Omaha
Children’s Hospital & Medical Center is a pediatric hospital and specialty center in Omaha, Nebraska. This nonprofit medical center has a 145-bed hospital and 50+ outpatient clinics that saw 623,700 patient visits in 2017. Their 11 regional clinics in 3 states had 8,900 visits that year.
The Challenge
Children’s has very aggressive growth goals. By 2025, they hope to:
- Go from 145 to 230 inpatient beds
- Provide more specialty care services and locations
- Expand from a Level II pediatric trauma center to Level I
- Offer 3+ outpatient centers
- Manage pediatric emergency departments and urgent care centers for regional providers
Growing their clinical service footprint means that patient volume has to grow as well, especially among patient families coming from out of town. One tactic for encouraging that growth was to have a website that showcases their breadth of services and answers common questions patient families have about getting care at Children’s.
The previous website, designed in 2008, offered limited information about clinical services, support services, and providers.
CareContent’s Solution & Process
To understand their strategic priorities, the CareContent team conducted more than 45 discovery interviews with senior leaders, staff, and families. The goal of the discovery period is to develop a deep understanding of how the site’s content and design can best serve the organization’s strategic goals and the needs of the key audiences: parents/caregivers, referring physicians, donors, and prospective employees.
At CareContent, we believe that the key information and tasks expected by the target audiences should drive everything. That’s why step one — before any mockups were designed or one line of code was written — was to define the content and the user experience.
A constant, iterative feedback loop allowed the CareContent team to ensure that deliverables reflected the content priorities of the organization’s senior leaders and patient families.
Key Results
The content-first approach has supported the organization’s ambitious growth goals. Since the site’s launch:
- Overall average monthly traffic on the new site increased by 28% in the first 5 months after launch.
- Average monthly organic traffic from search engines increased by 40% compared to the old site.
- Average time site visitors spent on strategic service line pages has increased by 50%.
- Mobile site traffic has surpassed desktop traffic.
- Call center volume has dropped by 50% since the new site launch: Before, people were calling for information about services, providers, etc. — but now this information is easily accessible on the website, leading to significant cost savings.
Educating patients and families, while keeping our competitive positioning in the market, is part of our mission as a marketing team. For years, CareContent has been a digital content partner in both strategy and execution for helping us achieve these goals.
