Building Connections Between Pages: An Updated Specialties and Conditions

A hospital is constantly growing and changing. Treatments improve, and technology gets bigger (or smaller), which means the system itself must shift and adapt — from physical construction and capital expenditures to changes within the intake process.

This doesn’t stop with digital. With the right plan and partner, websites don’t need to follow a boom-and-bust cycle, where an old design is scrapped every five years, and everyone starts anew. Instead, ongoing adjustment and change help preserve a site’s effectiveness while still adapting to new technology and communication models.

Blend’s work with children’s hospital partners reflects this commitment to growth and change, and nowhere is this more evident than in our recent work updating the model for specialties and conditions for Lurie Children’s Hospital.

For any healthcare site, the content of specialties and conditions is critical to identification and findability. While the explicit purpose of this type of content is to inform and connect providers to those who need their services, acting as a multi-pronged catalog of potential symptoms, solutions, and specialists as they are connected via links across the site, the secondary function is to provide usable keywords for search results, allowing a parent to search their child’s condition and potentially not just find an answer, but a medical solution in their area.

For Lurie Children’s Hospital, this experience had been growing long in the tooth. As a data model expands to include more information, the site’s ability to easily connect and manage the expanse of medical knowledge becomes increasingly tricky. Alongside Lurie’s design resource, Blend adapted a proposed redesign to work within the content model provided in Optimizely, creating a better connection between specific symptoms and conditions and the providers who could directly help.

This went beyond just showing a provider name at the bottom of a page. Everything is connected, with providers linking to specialties, appointments, and requests for a second opinion linked directly from the page, and a complete rework of how specialists and locations tie into the full scope of medical care, from research papers to training to the specialists themselves.

It’s an interconnected web of information, and — alongside Lurie Children’s Hospital — we untangled and reworked the entire web so that it feels more comfortable, works better, and effectively communicates the essential message: trusted healthcare can come in any shape, and it’s all right here.

Project results.

• Reviewed and adapted existing design for translation into Optimizely
• Integration of additional and improved connections between content types
• Full launch of new features within the existing site with no apparent downtime