Optimizing Search Functionality for Health Conditions

Goals

Vanderbilt Health is a comprehensive health care organization, including seven hospitals and more than 200 clinics for adults and children in Tennessee and Kentucky.

Vanderbilt Health wanted to upgrade its website and create a better digital patient experience by empowering them to learn more about their health and providing easy access to scheduling an appointment.

We worked closely with Vanderbilt Health to determine the major goals for this work:

Help users find information related to their condition.
Decrease barriers to care and facilitate an easy appointment scheduling experience.
Increase SEO rankings of the website as patients commonly search for their condition online.

Services Provided

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Challenge

The Vanderbilt Health website is set up by service line, which focuses on a type of patient or disease group rather than conditions. Because thousands of conditions are treated at a Vanderbilt Health facility, this hierarchy can make it challenging for users to find a provider and location who treat their condition.

User Research

Modea conducted deep user research through individual interviews and journey mapping to understand how Vanderbilt consumers are searching for conditions and navigating its website. A main outcome of our research was uncovering the fragmented process of seeking information about a particular condition and the inability to make an appointment from that condition’s page. Modea concluded that the experience of searching for conditions was impacting conversions and appointment scheduling on the Vanderbilt Health website.

This became an opportunity to reconfigure information about conditions on the website in a way that is consumer-focused and encourages appointment scheduling.

Patient-Focused Healthcare Website Design

To generate a patient-focused experience in Vanderbilt Health’s website design, the Modea team created automatic conditions pages, which generate on the website when a user searches for a condition.

Automatically populated condition pages are created by information stored in Vanderbilt Health’s content management system (CMS). By adding this feature, editors do not have to create a page for every condition a user searches for. Not only does this free up editors, but it also helps the user find out more information about their condition.

The auto conditions pages display providers who treat a particular condition when searched. Vanderbilt Health’s marketing team worked with providers to determine which conditions they treat, so that those particular conditions are shown on their profiles. Once a condition has been created for a provider, the condition will have a new page automatically populated with relevant information regarding the condition.

As a user looks for a particular condition, the content management system (CMS) also adds the relevant location where the condition is treated and any articles related to that condition. The user-focused website design creates a coherent user experience, facilitates care management, and strengthens the website’s functionality.

Development

Underwent user research to understand how a user searches for conditions and determined gaps in the experience that caused friction.
Generated a patient-focused experience in Vanderbilt Health’s website design by creating automatic condition pages.
Assisted patients in gaining a deeper understanding of their medical condition and provided a way to schedule appointments from the condition page.
Developed this feature to also free up editors so that they do not have to create a page for every condition.

Outcomes

This solution ensures that automatic content creation curates in a meaningful way for consumers. Additionally, as we’re creating pages based on conditions that are commonly searched, this will increase the website’s SEO ratings over time. Since Modea improved Vanderbilt Health’s website design and functionality, views per day on conditions pages have tripled.