St Vincent’s Private Hospital Network

Unifying St Vincent’s Private Hospital Network Without Losing Local Identity

Deepend unified 10 St Vincent’s private hospital websites on a flexible multi-tenant Kentico platform, preserving local hospital identity while enabling shared analytics, publishing workflows and up to 40% development efficiencies.

Client: St Vincent’s Health Australia

Industry: Healthcare, Private Hospitals, Health Services

Services: Human & Machine Experience Design; Intelligent Platforms & AI Systems; Content, Visibility and Analytics; Digital Transformation & Strategy

Target Audiences: Healthcare groups and multi-brand service networks that need central scale without erasing trusted local identities.

Year: 2020 - 2022

“The team leveraged a strong, consistent brand across all of the SVHA assets. The website now showcases the group's local hospitals, services offering and a unique "Find a specialist" tool. The complex information across 10 sites was streamlined through research and CX analysis to take SVHA online into a scalable, and highly flexible solution."

Matt Griffin - CEO Deepend

Overview

St Vincent's Private hospital network is a collection of 10 Private Hospitals, making it one of the largest providers of private healthcare in Australia. In 2020, SVHA embarked on a transformative journey with Deepend to amalgamate the Private Hospital Network into a single customer facing website, with a number of key goals.

Leveraging key insights from our initial Research and Ideation phase, we looked to build out the Network on a single platform that would create huge efficiencies for managing and deploying content and messaging for St Vincent’s. Furthermore, it would bring a consistency to the branding, customer experience and messaging used to represent the Hospitals. Corralling such a diverse group of locations under a single domain was not to be without its challenges:

The platform still needed to allow for each location to express its individual strengths, built up over considerable time and positioning each location in a specific manner. Also, the stakeholder management across such a distributed network of locations was also a significant challenge.

The Challenge

St Vincent’s Private Hospital Network comprised 10 hospitals with distinct local identities, service strengths and stakeholder groups.
The organisation needed one digital platform that could improve consistency and operational efficiency without flattening the local positioning each hospital had built over time.

The Opportunity

A shared platform could centralise infrastructure, analytics and publishing while allowing local teams to retain relevant content and brand flexibility.
The same modular architecture could also create a reusable foundation for future St Vincent’s public hospital, aged care and internal digital projects.

Deepend St Vincent’s Private Hospital Network

Existing data-sets were used extensively to build out key user profiles. These quantifiable insights ensured we involved a relevant and inclusive cohort of test users, that was truly representative of the diversity of St Vincent’s patients.

Our initial research phase saw us interact with a range of end users and key stakeholders. These conversations yielded a wealth of key data points and insights from across the care ecosystem. From GPs to Hospital Administration staff, from Practice Managers to Patient Support Staff. These data points were the basis for key insights that shaped both the information architecture and content strategy.

What We Delivered

User and stakeholder research
Audience profiling
Information architecture
Content strategy
Atomic design system
Multi-tenant platform design
Kentico v12 implementation
Analytics and marketing automation capability
Publishing workflows
Find a Specialist experience
Microsoft Azure hosting
Reusable component architecture

Impact

10 private hospitals consolidated into one customer-facing digital platform
Up to 40% efficiencies in development and infrastructure setup for subsequent projects
Improved consistency across brand, customer experience and messaging
More flexible content publishing across a distributed hospital network
Shared analytics and marketing automation capability across the platform
Reusable architecture extended into other St Vincent’s Health Australia projects

Value and Impact

Production Efficiencies

The site is envisaged to deliver significant efficiencies in both administration and timeliness of content publishing, allowing St Vincent’s to remain more current and relevant.

Streamlined Production

The extensibility of the technical infrastructure piece has already delivered efficiencies of around 40%, with regards to Production time allowance for future projects.

Balancing Lead Gen

Key to the ongoing success of the site will be ensuring the continued organic search performance of the platform, whilst balancing leads and traffic from a better balance of digital channels.

Problem & Insight

The core challenge was organisational as much as technical. St Vincent’s needed the efficiencies of a shared digital ecosystem without losing the trust and local relevance built by individual hospitals.

Research across clinical, administrative and support audiences showed that information architecture and content needed to serve diverse needs across the care journey.

Strategy & Experience Design

Deepend created an atomic design system in Zeplin to balance consistency with local flexibility.

The system allowed each hospital to highlight its own services and strengths while maintaining a recognisable parent-brand experience.

A shared information architecture and content strategy supported clearer navigation across the network, while a dedicated Find a Specialist tool helped users connect with relevant care.

Technology & Delivery

The platform was built on Kentico v12 with multi-tenancy, analytics, marketing automation and configurable publishing workflows.

The website was hosted in Microsoft Azure using Australian-based cloud infrastructure to support local data sovereignty requirements.

The component-based architecture was designed for reuse, reducing the effort required to extend the system into other St Vincent’s digital environments.

The creative platform for the site is centred on the development of an atomic design system. Built out using the creative technology platform Zeplin. This provides a highly adaptable design system, allowing St Vincent’s a huge amount of flexibility for template layout. This allows considerable efficiencies for future work across projects for their Public Hospital and Aged Care Networks, as well as other internal projects.

The site platform is built using Kentico v12, catering to a number of key requirements including multi-tenancy, powerful analytics and marketing automation function (allowing the ability to engineer personalised journeys for key user segment over time), and a range of publishing workflows (to assist in distribution of workload for maintaining and updating the website content).

Results

The new platform gave St Vincent’s Health Australia a consistent digital home for its private hospital network while preserving each location’s identity.

The reusable architecture later delivered up to 40% efficiencies in development and infrastructure setup for related St Vincent’s projects.