Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Peninsula Regional Health System Marketing Department
At 120 years old, Peninsula Regional Health System (PRHS), headquartered in Salisbury, Md., is the Delmarva region’s oldest health care institution. Experience in improving the community’s well-being is the provider’s specialty. Unfortunately, the centenarian’s web platform was also dated and in need of emergency care, so lifesaving Drupal 7 updates were required to be performed for a more streamlined, convenient content management system.
Starting in early 2015, our development team at Inclind embarked on a six-week discovery process with PRHS to clearly define the objectives for a possible Drupal website redesign. The process involved interviewing department heads and integral staff members at PRHS to get to know the organization inside and out. And what Inclind discovered were two main problems to be resolved:
- The PRHS marketing team had no real control over the current website; major barriers were preventing them from making changes and updates to the site when needed.
- The site wasn’t modern or touch-friendly; the content wasn’t up-to-date.
About the project
Our main goal in this partnership with PRHS was to aim for a consistent Drupal content management system. Its location along the coast required the hospital to be, well, hospitable and approachable for this tourism area. The site needed to appeal to two audience sets: visitors who know nothing about PRHS, as well as long-term residents of the local community that rely on the healthcare system.
Front end Drupal developer Nick Bumgarner, project coordinator Nancy Jones, designer Amy Wood and Inclind founder/director Shaun Tyndall scrubbed in each and every week to meet and collaborate with PRHS. We followed that with an agile development process, starting with a physician search and location search function, and continuing with the website launch, when we shifted into a support role, and even further, when the PRHS patient portal was expected to roll out.
Development building blocks included moving the site onto our preferred hosting system, Pantheon, using Drupal technology – something we were sure to educate PRHS on, so they were on board with all of its benefits and advantages.
Web design was transformed from stagnant and stale into responsive and interactive, delivering the same positive experience onto any device you’re accessing peninsula.org from. Static promo panels were brought to life with rotating hospital videos on the home page. The redesign is also mobile-friendly, focused on user tasks like improved doctor searches simplified by filters such as a doctor’s name and specialty.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal provided the necessary flexible open source platform necessary to integrate other third-party systems, such as:
- The mobile Wayfinder tool. Visitors can now find the closest lab, pharmacy or doctor’s office based on their location anywhere outside the hospital.
- HealthcareSource. Potential employees are now able to conduct more productive job searches, thanks to this user experience system we implemented that seamlessly populates all career posts within peninsula.org. Instead of this page being dropped into a third party job search engine, it’s dynamically loaded right onto peninsula.org to complement the design style of the site.
- News and Events. Visitors can scroll through a news and events section designed to deliver a more visual, interactive experience, complete with a convenient calendar that features a filtered search for events by category.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
We used this set of modules to increase the site’s capabilities, which include feeding job posts from an applicant management system, pinpointing the nearest healthcare location and contact information, collectively managing all media assets and files, providing robust layout control of content management, connecting with Apache Solr for a smarter search experience, improving search optimization, and more efficiently showcasing the site’s content, such as the physician finder section.
