The Sant Joan de Déu website, worthy of its patients

Hospital Sant Joan de Déu Barcelona has cared for children, adolescents and pregnant women since 1867. It is a non-profit institution of the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God, a centre of excellence in paediatrics and maternal health, a teaching hospital and one of Europe's leading paediatric centres, with patients arriving from 95 countries. Its website is the gateway to all of that: the first stop for a family looking for a specialist, an international patient seeking a second opinion, or a professional who wants to train there. In 2020, the hospital's Digital Channels team was looking for a team specialised in large, complex Drupal projects to rebuild it from the ground up, and that's where we came in.

The previous website was already built on Drupal, but it had serious performance and availability problems. The hosting and the architecture behind it meant it got overloaded, ran slowly, or went down outright, often at weekends, exactly when a family was looking for a service, a specialty or a way to book an appointment. For a hospital handling over 300,000 consultations a year, this wasn't a technical problem — it was an urgent need.

On top of that, the ecosystem was genuinely complex. Seven languages with different levels of coverage, from full Spanish and Catalan to landing pages in Chinese, French and Arabic for international patients. Over 40 forms, with 112 variants across languages, for booking appointments, sending clinical documentation or requesting treatment. Integrations with the CRM, newsletters, user support and the donations platform. And an ecosystem of sites around the corporate website, each one going its own way. That was the complexity we had to tackle and resolve.

The brief was to build a new Drupal-based web ecosystem that could grow, perform well and gradually absorb the pieces of the hospital's digital puzzle. And a challenge that goes beyond technology: bringing to the website the experience a patient has on walking into Sant Joan de Déu — that of its professionals, its spaces and its processes — so that whoever arrives through a screen finds the same thing: care that is effective, consistent, useful, direct, fast and warm.

We started with strategy, together with the hospital's Digital Channels team: we defined the website's objectives together, identified its external and internal users in co-creation sessions, and mapped their customer journeys. There was no shortcut to understanding what each person arriving at the website needs, and what the hospital needs to communicate and deliver its services.

In the conceptualisation phase we turned that work into the new information architecture, the content plan, the menu and navigation systems, the external and internal user flows, and navigable wireframes for every template, on desktop and mobile. The content plan set out what would be migrated, what would be created from scratch and which URLs would change, with their redirects, so as not to lose accumulated search rankings. And together with the hospital we defined a digital governance model: roles, permissions and publishing workflows for a large editorial team.

In design we created a graphic system that respects the hospital's corporate manual while serving the user experience, and documented it in a web style guide so the ecosystem could keep growing in an orderly way, with us or without us.

For content we built a template system so the hospital's team could prepare new content following the site tree, plus a technical solution to migrate and transform the content being reused from the old website.

In development we built the new website on the latest version of Drupal, with a custom front and back end, seven languages with centralised translation management, the forms and search tools, and integrations with the CRM, newsletters, user support and the donations platform. We defined the infrastructure requirements and put the hospital in touch with our usual hosting provider for this kind of project, a high-availability specialist, to leave the outages behind. We deployed the site, optimised its performance and trained the hospital's team to manage its content independently.

And we continue with ongoing support: we handle migrating the platform through its successive versions, in 2024 we integrated the International Patient service into the corporate website, we rebuilt the Escola de Salut on Drupal, and we maintain the website with an SLA-backed technical service and a bank of hours for ongoing improvements.