Northwest Acute Care Specialists /​Legacy Health Systems: Physican Center Intranet Redesign 

The Overall Problem

Located in Portland, Northwest Acute Care Specialists, P.C. (NACS) is an independent emergency medicine and physician group of over 150 providers who serve over thousands of patients a year. Over the years, they’ve built a reputation of providing specialized care to residents of Oregon. NACS wanted a site that could expand their presence by serving as the public face to NACS, as well as have something extensive on the backend to serve as an informational, educational and communication hub for their employees. NACS expected physicians to have an unadorned, informative and orderly experience while accessing the intranet and that’s where GRAYBOX stepped in.

Our Solution

1. Intent and Interface Planning

Successfully creating a site that caters to more than one audience, both employees and potential clients requires a significant amount of knowledge and research in order to better convey NACS message, goals, and extensive expertise in the medical field. GRAYBOX worked with key decision makers for NACS to outline the direction and the goals of the project in a collaborative effort to have a clear understanding of desired results and users. Considering the intranet portion of the site, NACS envisioned the primary user to be an employed physician with access to professional medical materials.

2. Site Design and Wireframing

Through the process of the site design, organization and structure was consistently optimized to the needs and goals of the different audience groups identified by NACS. Because the physicians expected to use the intranet are always on the go, the sleek intranet design composed of about 40 individual pages had to be compatible with mobile, web, and tablet interface. This was a meticulous design process as the intranet also carried a lot of varying information and resources that would then have to be altered and made compatible.

3. Data Planning for Reporting

The cornerstone of the intranet was to create a centralized hub for all internal data. We consolidated data from Legacy's internal systems, payroll, a third-party education credit system, and other internal databases. This data was then exposed via user-specific report permissions so that you could compare performance on a physician, clinic and hospital level. These reports gave the physicians live and accurate pictures of their performance among their peers.

4. Implementation as a custom Ruby on Rails applications

From the designs, wireframes and data objects, we then built a custom Ruby on Rails application that would serve both the intranet to SSO validated users, public pages for general consumption and speciality access for para-professionals. The entire app was managed in a custom CMS which we also designed.

5. Training Roadshow

With all the different and busy physicians all over the region, GRAYBOX executed a traveling training roadshow at a variety of locations so we could train the NACS team on how to use and manage the intranet.