A Breakthrough in Consumer Impact and Flexibility

Johns Hopkins Medicine International is the division of Johns Hopkins responsible for the global advancement of the mission: to improve the health of the community and the world by setting the standard of excellence in medical education, research and care.

Johns Hopkins Medicine International develops high-impact collaborations throughout the world by leveraging Johns Hopkins’ extensive knowledge of medicine, nursing, public health, medical education, research and health care administration to improve health and health care delivery.

Johns Hopkins Medicine International also facilitates personalized, culturally appropriate care for Johns Hopkins Medicine’s global patients, and provides specialized concierge health care services.

A 2020 Sitecore Experience Award Winner, Valtech’s health information site for Johns Hopkins Medicine incorporates a gorgeous design, content and personalization strategy using categorization that “meets the user where they live,” and hyper-flexible templating.

A world-class source of consumer healthcare information, The Johns Hopkins Medicine health information project represents the leading academic medical center’s first aggressive foray into consumer healthcare.

A runaway success, it was a crucial resource in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, with over a million page views a day. Including over 55 high-value Helix modules, the project also kicks off larger development of the ecosystem by Hopkins Medicine and Valtech. The site is a model for everything Sitecore can be in healthcare.

The beginning of a new strategy towards greater customer engagement and more accessible positioning, Hopkinsmedicine.org/health and other related properties represent a shift for the organization towards more effective, tested and richer communication with the public.

Key to its success was a content strategy (not to mention associated personalization and content automation) that was based around the kinds of categories and mental models that people are familiar with. Topics like “aging,” “health and wellness,” and “teen mental health” took precedence over the likes of “rheumatology” and “cardiovascular” to cluster how visitors accessed content and how it was surfaced through personalization and automation. In combination with an accessible, magazine-like design and leading expertise, this was a dramatic and effective change.

Developed in concert with content producers, Valtech’s implementation of the site is highly flexible. Making sophisticated best-practice use of Sitecore’s Helix standard for architectural scaling and modularity, editors are able to assemble complex layouts, test components and make use of automation to build better content experiences.

The project makes extensive use of SEO best practices alternate Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) versions, designed for speed and readability, that drive increased findability for newly published content in Google; it is also completely accessible and mobile friendly. We consider these to be the best practices for any commercial healthcare site with unique content, and in this project, we were able to take them to a particularly high level. And everything scales to accommodate a huge amount of content, traffic, analytics-driven decision-making and consistent change.

Johns Hopkins Medicine now has a huge, flexible toolkit they are using to build leading experiences, including complex and personalized components like polls, helper applications, in depth articles, complex content automation, rich multimedia and much more—all with lightning-fast time to market.

The site has generated a deeper, far more multi-dimensional relationship with the consumer. Extension of this work will now become the DNA of a much larger effort to redevelop the organization’s larger ecosystem.