Mass General Brigham

MasS General
Brigham

Creating a unified digital ecosystem for a major healthcare network as it rebranded

ROLE:

UX Lead Strategist, Researcher, & Designer

SERVICES:

PROJECT CONTEXT

Formerly known as Partners HealthCare, the organization decided to rebrand themselves as Mass General Brigham to leverage the brand authority from the two world-renown flagship hospitals and teaching organizations within their non-profit hospital network, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital.

BWH and MGH are international leaders in virtually every area of medicine and have been the sites of pioneering breakthroughs that have improved lives around the world. Although each of these prestigious organizations have their own powerful brand identities, the parent organization lacked the same brand recognition and was missing out on the potential of the collective authority gained within the medical space from unifying and centralizing the brand.

Mass General Brigham needed a new website and digital presence to coincide with the launch of this new brand. The website needed to promote all of the amazing medical education opportunities and cutting edge research, and associate this work with their hospital and physician network, for prospective healthcare patients seeking care from a world class healthcare system.

I worked with Mass General Brigham to create a unified central digital hub, connecting their innovative research, medical education and integrated healthcare system. Flipping the script where the old parent organization Partners Healthcare was in the background, to Mass General Brigham now being front and center and the integrated face of the collective organization.

Challenge

Solution

Process

Assess the existing content and role of hundreds of healthcare, research, medical education and hospital sites within the network. Prioritize what sties should be integrated into the new site, partially consolidated, or removed altogether.

Design a MVP site ASAP to launch with the new brand announcement, then redesign the entire site to better integrate all online facets of the network.

Establish authority on the web as a world-class trusted advisor, competing with Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic among other prestigious healthcare systems for online authority in the medical healthcare space.

Meet the educational and transactions needs of various audiences with greatly different user needs and goals, while simultaneously creating an experience that feels like a seamless unified brand.

Interview various department heads in charge of medical education, medical research, innovation, patient care etc. to categorize the greatly varying needs of each pillar of the new site. Research how other large healthcare networks tackle this complex information architecture and navigational structure challenge.

Clarify the vast audience groups of the site and unify the information architecture of dozen of sites and thousands of disjointed pages to create an outwardly appearing integrated experience as much as possible. Then determine what services should get the primary real estate on the new centralized site.

Continue to work in close collaboration with internal stakeholders to refine this structure, test assumptions with user testing, and present to the C-Suite for approval at each major milestone.

Created a unified online hub for the new brand, that leveraged the value of the individual brand identities to create a sum that is more powerful than its parts individually.

Designed an uber nav for users to seamlessly navigate across the varying pillars of the organization at a high level. Then provided the ability to drill down to low level pages using the mega menu main nav within each pillar of the site. Connecting all these pillars on one site supported the goal of a unified brand experience while allowing for a unique and uncluttered user experience within each pillar of the site.

Balanced leading with transactional tasks for prospective and existing patients, graduate medical students, researchers, and investors with telling a unified brand narrative across the site to support the new integrated healthcare system brand identity.