Huntington Hospital

Digital Transformation for one of Southern California’s premier medical institutions

Project Overview

DigiSavvy and Echo-Factory team up to tackle one of Southern California’s most well-respected medical institutions digital platform needs.

Huntington Hospital is the premier regional medical center, serving the San Gabriel Valley. Their existing website solution was failing them, difficult to manage, even more difficult to use, and support from their vendor was slow to respond to even the most basic requests.

Echo-Factory, an award-winning Advertising Agency, based in Pasadena, tapped DigiSavvy to partner up on the Huntington Hospital digital transformation project.

DigiSavvy has partnered with a number of marketing and ad agencies, who lack dedicated digital / web production teams in-house, over the years. And we were stoked to work with an outfit with Echo-Factory’s reputation.

The project as laid out was going to be a challenge and had to be delivered on an accelerated timeline. Echo-Factory was in a dire place and needed to deliver an exception, well-thought, and smoothly executed digital platform to one of their most prestigious clients.

With a deep breath and copious amounts of caffeine, DigiSavvy got to work and began planning out their approach to this critical project.

Division of responsibilities

Echo-Factory was the agency of record in this engagement and has a top notch team of creatives and are also a strong process-oriented agency.

  • Digital Creative
  • UX Design
  • Account Management
  • Project Management

For DigiSavvy, we were the subcontractor and we handled the digital production side of things.

  • Web Development
  • Production
  • Discovery and research
  • WordPress theme and plugin development

The Challenge

Huntington Hospital’s legacy digital platform was built on a proprietary CMS, it was difficult to use, their vendor was slow to provide support, and getting updates posted to their website was cumbersome and always a chore.

Echo-Factory is a full service agency when it comes to creative delivery, and while they have web and digital expertise in house, they required a trusted partner who wouldn’t disappear when things got tough, so their leadership trusted DigiSavvy to do the job, based on their long-standing reputation as a capable and transparent shop.

Huntington Hospital’s digital platform requirements

  • An easy to manage and update content management system.
  • To auto-populate new physician record’s into their online physician database
  • Provide robust search capabilities
  • Be able to quickly create promotional landing pages and make critical updates when an emergency arises

The Solution

DigiSavvy proposed an Open Source solution (WordPress) for the Content Management System for the following reasons:

  • It’s a trusted, reliable solution, that power’s some of the most frequently visited websites on the web.
  • The CMS is regularly updated and innovated, ensuring that the website platform will grow with them.
  • There’s a huge community of professional’s who work on WordPress, unlike their previous CMS, so they’ll always have access to experts who can help in a pinch, should DigiSavvy become unavailable.
  • Provided capability to import physician’s from their physician DB into their website, updating physicians/adding/removing records on the fly.
  • Leveraged intelligent search that uses machine learning to help steer users to the right information they’re looking for.

The Results

The power to inform their local community quickly

With the updated website in place, Huntington’s team was able to rapidly update their community of emergencies and also upcoming events on their event calendar. This was specifically useful as COVID-19 began to take hold, being able to post updates from their resident infectious disease professional was absolutely crucial

Improved platform usability empowers marketing and PR teams

The new website allowed their marketing and PR teams to easily and quickly deploy new landing pages for various awareness campaigns and ad campaigns for specific initiatives and they were able to leverage their website as a central hub for communication, in addition to TV and radio spots, along with paid media, all managed by the talented crew at Echo-Factory

“Sending a note to say thank you for your help transitioning the Huntington site. Your team built a great platform and were a reliable partner to my team.”

Mike Schaffer CEO, Echo-Factory