Leading U.S. Healthcare Company

A leading national US healthcare company with headquarters in Boston, MA turned to Thinkbean for help with several of their web properties. They had multiple projects/sites, hosted and managed via an array of disparate technologies (including multiple content management systems).

As is the case with many contemporary major healthcare providers, their web-based projects experience significant annual growth in both scale of operations and relevance to core business practices. They face many of the same issues challenging other large organizations within the healthcare industry, not the least of which is... how to accommodate the growing needs of their web-based projects without adding to the overall complexity of operations - while simultaneously increasing the efficiency of those operations.

There was a degree of increased complexity in the over-arching goals, as the company had important projects underway with very large, high-profile government agencies and were running into some development roadblocks. Fortunately, the projects with/for the government were being built with Drupal - which is Thinkbean's specialty. The reality of their situation was... the only consistencies they did have were pain points such as: missing functionality, slow turnaround times for change requests, inability to make required changes via CMS, different vendors for each project and large training and learning curve for each application.

The first order of business was to clearly define and document the hundreds of business and user goals which would form the basis of an action plan to deliver the required results. Interviews with the various stakeholders across multiple projects revealed a large number of similar needs including; the ability to make changes to anything, anywhere, at any time, future proofing to ensure ability to grow and access to an expert and responsive service provider.

The company agreed with the premises of the aforementioned article and understood the efficiencies to be gained by standardizing on one platform - whatever that might be. So, one of the important early decisions to be addressed was... of the various platforms currently in-use, which was the ideal candidate on which to standardize? Given the then-current and future functionality of most of the projects, the essential ability to scale (you can't outgrow Drupal) and the need to integrate with various databases, systems and infrastructure, the logical choice for a platform on which to standardize was Drupal.

The fact local and national government is standardizing on Drupal meant all current and future government projects (a large and important aspect of their business) would require Drupal. Partnering with Thinkbean meant anyone across their organization could ask a question and receive an answer from an actual Drupal expert on the same day.

Easy customization for complex custom requirements.

A cohesive internet presence across the board.

We continue to work daily with the company, migrating project-by-project to the new (and much more advanced) Drupal 8 platform. New projects are continually built upon the Drupal 8 CMS, with flexible content components allowing for custom layout and content - but managed in a familiar administration environment. The new skills being learned by company staff can be used company-wide. Staff moving between departments are already familiar with the software - a huge time and effort savings.

This provides them with the following ongoing benefits; easy to use and powerful content admin area, transferable skills from project to project, stable, secure, scalable sites and applications as well as direct access to developers.