Sitecore Content Hub: A Transformational Technology for Consumer Healthcare

Consumer Healthcare has a content problem. Often the sentence “we need to develop more content” (meaning pictures, text, video, interactives, and any combinations thereof) is not an exciting notion to hospital system administrators, consumer healthcare entrepreneurs, and other stakeholders who are shepherding healthcare budgets. The classic retort comes back, usually quickly—“we aren’t Mayo clinic, we are not in the health content development business”— sometimes augmented with comments about previous failed expeditions into content land, or ideas for deeply insufficient budgets; comments that leave the digital team scratching their collective heads. While the retort may be true, the comment misses the mark, and the reality of the ascendance of digital experiences and their intrinsic reliance on compelling, accurate content to have digital success.

A better way to recast the issue not as “content”, but rather as “every patient interaction, and all of the patient engagement that happens outside the call center and treatment room.” Properly understood, the number of content interactions that can influence patient experience, satisfaction, repeat engagement, and the financial bottom line of each interaction is staggering in healthcare (perhaps why there is so much denial about it). It is (along with usability design and performance) at the heart of every aspect of digital patient experience, and though large sections of this content are often treated as an afterthought, it is the singular place that organizations can improve radically within their digital strategy.

Consider some of the common modes of crucial healthcare content:

• The unique content that increases findability through search engines for specific healthcare service lines, high value procedures, locations, topical subjects, etc.
• Topical marketing campaign content, designed to drive appointments or engagement through multiple digital channels.
• The content that describes offerings to better align engagement: conditions treated, appointments, modes of engagement (telemedicine, etc.), and what is treated where.
• Logistical information, per service line or per location, or related to specific events (vaccinations, pandemic, etc.)
• Frequently asked questions—some specific to a service line or treatment, others sometimes shared between many different cases.
• What to expect guide content related to specific procedure and consultations that is more in depth and has a determinate sequence.
• Post-visit or post-operative instructions related to specific engagements with patients.
• For academic medical centers, the content that gets the publicity value from unique research and accomplishments and explains the translation of that work to patient value.
• Master data management of the facts, such a provider profiles and credentials, or locations and their addresses.
• And many other types of content…

All of this content production is often fragmented, and liable to be missed or mis-aligned, leading to confusion and customer dissatisfaction. The cost of keeping so much content accurate, active, and effective is rarely calculated; it is high enough that, in the absence of clear business cases, there are huge lapses and lost opportunity costs that are not addressed which directly impact the bottom line.

Enter Sitecore Content Hub, the excellent and easy to adopt SaaS Content Operations platform—a no-code (read low-to-no programmer intervention) configurable platform that is optimized to create a unified, well-governed, content-rich digital ecosystem. With Content Hub, not only do content operations become more efficient, Content Hub also mitigates the situations of tasks not getting done because of disorganization. Analysts (or marketers) within your operation can be trained to model new forms of content and tweak processes, giving your organization the perfect balance of flexibility and centralized control. Content Hub is feature-rich, easy to use, and can be customized to be completely presentation neutral—it can drive web content, and with integrations, even print-on-demand, or feeding content back into Epic, allowing an organization to break down many of its traditional silos.

Content Hub can play the role of master data management system (MDM) for some or all of these types of content—including providers, locations, and their metadata. Some content may be integrated from other master data management systems to be managed in terms of multi-channel delivery (or even augmented with richer media than can exist in those systems before being presented to customers) so it not unusual for Content Hub to hold the “marketing-ready” version of content, fed back into other institutional back-end databases. On top of this powerful system for modeling, scheduling, and controlling content through workflows, Content Hub provides proprietary tools for thematically searching content, outputting it in different formats (including print) and managing complex associations between content. This is particularly useful for enterprises who need to quickly institute global changes in messaging (as in the early days of COVID-19) across content from multiple sources and output across multiple consumer channels. Content Hub radically enables that kind of supervision, while at the same time, being easy and flexible to use to organize the day-to-day business of content production and upkeep.

The time has clearly come to get serious about content—both operationally, and in terms of governance—and to build the repeatable, high-quality, cost-efficient structures to make it happen. Sitecore Content Hub is a revelation in that context, and a perfect platform to become the backbone of modern healthcare content production.

If you are interested to understand more, TBG can help. As one of the few Sitecore partners in the U.S. that were early adopters of Content Hub, we can explain how it could apply to your business, and help you plan a roadmap, and assist with implementation all the way to a functional practice. Contact us and let us know how we can help!

John Berndt
I'm CEO of TBG and I've been thinking about the Web in creative ways since the year it began.

The original version of this page was published at:  https://www.berndtgroup.net/thinking/blog/sitecore/sitecore-content-hub-a-transformational-technology