The DispatchHealth challenge
Four years ago, we were open in six places; today, you can access DispatchHealth in 55 different cities. Our growth meant we rapidly outgrew our initial take at a website with WordPress. As the website is our marketing front door, it also really needed to stand up to the task of telling the story of who we were more effectively.
Founded in 2013, Denver-based DispatchHealth’s brand promise is to bring the power of the hospital to the comfort of a U.S. patient’s home.
Four years ago, this was a message being heard in just six cities. Now, the company is well on the way to achieving its aim of building the world’s largest tech-enabled in-home care system with a presence in 55 U.S. locations and half a million patients on its books. It also has a growing network of healthcare providers and insurance partners aiding delivery.
The problem, as its Chief Growth Officer Andrea Pearson shares during a recent Brightspot webinar, was that the company’s expansion meant its initial WordPress website had just stopped making sense.
It used to take days to be able to make changes. To update something on the site across all 55 cities and 1,000 pages, we had to create a new template and work out where all those changes needed to be made. It was just taking too long, and we don't have the staff to be able to do that. And because of the way we had originally constructed things on the WordPress platform, you really had to be a designer to make any meaningful impact on the publishing side, and I didn't want a designer every time I wanted to make a change.
In particular, two problems kept cropping up. First, the existing website wasn’t reflecting the new messaging that leadership wanted out of a major re-branding exercise.
Second, the company did not want to lose all the search-engine keyword optimization and keyword visibility it had created. Andrea says a company like hers depends a lot on organic search-based marketing, so one of the key considerations around any possible web upgrade was making sure there would be no impact to online visibility.
In addition, she says the company focuses its IT resourcing on core activities—its efficient at-home clinical care services. Time spent on a dedicated website/CMS felt like a luxury it couldn’t afford.
"I needed to ensure that I didn't need a designer every time I wanted to make a change," she says.
Given she needs to look after thousands of pages of online content, this wasn’t going to be easy to do. It was time for a change, but the change had to be done correctly.
This has been achieved and, according to Andrea, it’s down to DispatchHealth leveraging Brightspot’s out-of-the-box CMS features and capabilities.
The Brightspot solution for DispatchHealth
Now Andrea has an easy-to-use content engine and website that fully supports her company’s new brand identity. Her SEO fears have proven to be unfounded, and all the organization's previous effort has not only been transferred successfully to the new site, but it has also achieved a 40% uplift in reach.
She also praises a new architecture based on an ability to treat the site as a set of components that makes updating super-easy and highly efficient. And perhaps best of all, Brightspot’s support for modular content means that she can now publish different types of content for multiple and different sets of customers.
I've done site migrations several times over the years, and the thing that you always worry about—whether you're a large enterprise or a small publisher—is that you've put in a lot of previous work to create an SEO footprint. I didn't want to mess anything up on the SEO footprint side, and with the Brightspot replatforming what we saw was not only no loss, but a very welcome 40% improvement.
"If you're a big national insurance company, you want to have a set of assets to activate your patients in the markets you operate in one place," she says. "We now have a really robust set of capabilities to customize the partner website experiences so it’s different for a consumer or someone who's just looking to learn more about the services in 55 cities."
She adds: "We use a lot of video to explain our clinical capabilities, so being able to take those modules and publish them across multiple pages for things that can appear across many, many pages creates a huge amount of efficiency."
Miles De Feyter, Director, Client Engagements at Brightspot, says of the new website and CMS launch using Brightspot: "DispatchHealth definitely took advantage of the concept of shared modules, especially when it comes to pages that are similar and duplicated multiple times, but still have custom content."
He adds: "DispatchHealth also takes advantage of the built-in key phrase replacement piece—so, the location would be 'Denver,' and it'll automatically insert the word 'Denver' so that they can write the phrase for what the intro is once across all locations, but it looks custom and specific to each page. It’s a pretty, cool way to manage the customization."
How Brightspot functionality made it all happen
The move happened in just 60 days after Andrea had challenged Miles to make it possible for DispatchHealth to unveil its new online capabilities at a major investor conference.
Partners are a critical part of our business, especially on the search side, so we’re very excited about Brightspot integrations for Salesforce, which is our platform for CRM, and Pardot, which we use for that trigger base communication. We're very excited about being able to build out a very systematic marketing automation approach and having that tied to Brightspot.
"Yes, that meant moving at a great clip," she jokes. "But that’s how we like to run here at DispatchHealth—this is emergency medicine. Nothing goes slowly around here."
"Brightspot had all of the features Andrea was looking for," says Miles. "And because her timeline was so tight, we really needed to leverage existing modules and existing functionality.
"The Brightspot CMS gave us that," he continues. "An out-of-the-box package of utilities to start publishing, which we fine-tuned to match DispatchHealth’s design principles."
As for how how Brightspot’s features and functionality made the move such a success, Andrea credits the partnership between the two teams as the real difference maker.
"The reason you go outside to do things is that you can do it smarter, better, faster, and with people who know more than you do," she says. "And in this case, we found that to be absolutely true."
Check out the webinar to find out how Brightspot might help you move on to a new website just as easily as DispatchHealth has done.
