VITAS
Building a Modern Intranet
Established in 1978, VITAS Healthcare is a pioneer and leader in the American hospice movement. Hospitals, health systems, physicians, and other healthcare professionals partner with VITAS to provide quality end-of-life care for their patients. VITAS employs more than 12,000 professionals who care for terminally ill patients in 14 states and the District of Columbia.
An Outdated and Unpredictable Intranet
VITAS’ existing out-of-the-box SharePoint intranet was outdated. Administrators had little guidance on how to disseminate fresh news and content via the platform. Similarly, a lack of search functionality made it challenging for users to find information.
The platform was neither mobile friendly nor accessible outside the firewall. This created challenges with leveraging the intranet for professional development or continuing education training, which are fundamental to VITAS’ mission of providing quality hospice care.
Finally, the intranet’s design did not reflect the company’s brand standards.
Overall, end-users found the site difficult to use, unpredictable, and a poor experience, resulting in poor adoption.
VITAS knew it needed a new intranet, as well as a change management strategy to ensure end-user adoption and success.
A Rejuvenated and Modern Intranet Portal
Leveraging our Enable methodology, we conducted a series of on-site, full-day sessions with key VITAS stakeholders to understand their goals and objectives while weighing them against end-user needs to develop user personas and draft initial mockups. We then conducted end-user interviews to gather feedback and further understand the solution parameters. From the data collected, we led exercises with a sample user population to develop an information architecture prototype.
After testing the prototype to validate the structure with end users, we conducted a thorough content assessment, ensuring that VITAS migrated only relevant content.
Upon completion of this initial planning phase, and after a thorough analysis of requirements, we guided VITAS on its decision to leverage Perficient’s Rise intranet platform and Microsoft Office 365 for its new intranet. VITAS chose Rise for its robust functionality, mobile-first design, and ongoing support and product roadmap. Our experts leveraged out of-the box Rise functionality along with key customizations to deliver a robust modern intranet portal for VITAS’ employee population.
Introducing myVITAS
The Rise portal is accessible to the entire VITAS employee population, offering a rich mobile-responsive interface. Content owners can publish news and organizational information with ease through the simple-to-use content management features. All content utilizes approved VITAS-branded templates to enforce content and visual governance.
The search experience was greatly improved through Rise-enabled directories that support searches of critical content such as news, applications, documents, programs, and FAQs.
The modern intranet platform opened the door for VITAS to integrate with other tools within the Microsoft stack, including Power BI dashboards which help monitor user data and enable content owners to respond to feedback in real time with user-specific content.
The new intranet filled a foundational gap as a central hub for VITAS company news and information, resulting in operational efficiencies and driving new opportunities for cross-functional collaboration and socializing. Improved governance means content is now curated so that it is relevant and engaging. Robust search features enable employees to rely on the portal for knowledge sharing and collaboration.
Last but not least, employees feel a sense of ownership in the site, which they can use to access important information such as HR policies and procedures, benefits, vacation guidelines and even check their PTO balance.
Since launching myVITAS in 2018, we’ve experienced a huge success in our employee’s adoption and easier access to relevant, accurate and critical information to enhance their productivity. Additionally, it’s coalesced our 47 programs by allowing them to share news and updates from their locations company wide to feel more connected.”Drew Landmeier, SVP & Chief Marketing Officer
Results
A Modern Intranet for Communication and Collaboration
- A 2000% increase in site traffic, with 1.85 million page views in the first 10 months, compared to 104K page views total in the prior year
- Average time spent on the site more than doubled from three to seven minutes
- Bounce rates down 33% from a high of 70% with more than 63% of users looking at multiple pages on the site
- Mobile access helped drive soaring adoption rates by enabling access for field staff who were previously unable to access the site