Clear the Way to Care
The website needed a better bedside manner.
Role: Content strategist & senior copywriter
Client: Major academic medical center
Client under NDA. Visuals recreated to reflect strategy and process
Problem
Credentials got top billing.
The medical center was undertaking a $20 million website redesign spanning 16,000 pages over two years. The existing pages led with what the hospital wanted to say about its credentials and expertise, while patients were left to work out what that meant for them. We had to make those pages useful to someone trying to understand their care and decide what to do next.
Insight
Patients don’t all come through the same door.
Needing care doesn’t always mean knowing what care you need. Someone with unexplained symptoms has different questions from someone ready to book with a specialist. The same page could serve both, but what each person needed from it would be different.
Idea
Make room for the patient.
I organized the content around what patients needed to do, from understanding a condition to finding care. Through the content audit, I identified what to consolidate, rewrite or retire. I then defined navigation and reusable page structures around patient needs, giving the team a consistent way to turn those needs into useful pages.
I set the voice and tone guidelines and wrote copy alongside a five-person content and UX writing team. I also defined content ownership and review workflows so the information patients relied on could stay current after launch.
