Based in Norfolk, VA, Sentara Healthcare serves more than 2 million residents in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina through its broad network of over 70 care giving sites (including six hospitals), physicians, medical services, and health plans. Starting in 2002, Sentara decided to consolidate separate existing Web sites for its main constituencies (consumers, physicians, employees, and insurance members) into a single-role-based portal served from a new content management system. Dynamic Diagrams contributed to this effort by helping visualize the new portal's architecture and providing a phased plan for the project.

Like many large organizations, Sentara's online presence had developed in a decentralized manner, with various divisions managing Web sites with different yet related content. When we joined the project, Sentara had already identified a number of redundancies and gaps in information. However, the organization needed a better model for illustrating how the new portal would connect related information across the organization, and how it would reuse content items for multiple audiences.

In order to develop an information architecture for the portal, we needed to better understand how users would interact with the content. We began by creating a high-level diagram depicting how different user roles would access appropriate content items. Since the portal content would be owned and maintained by different departments, we then examined Sentara's organizational structure. This enabled us to develop a visual framework of the physical locations, people, and services that constitute Sentara Healthcare. Once this framework was verified, we explored how users might access the content across this framework and developed three additional diagrams depicting key transactions. In this way, the content became grounded in the user's experience of the portal.

Along with visually depicting the portal model in terms of content and access, we created additional document tools for Sentara's use in the creation of the enterprise portal. As a result of this engagement, we have helped Sentara Healthcare plan a portal solution that can be implemented, sustained, and extended in a controlled and predictable fashion.

Related case studies: Optima Health Web Site Redesign; Sentara.com Web Site Redesign.