About

Community Medical has a long history of serving the health-care needs of the people who live in Central California. Although Community exists today as an integrated system of facilities and services, their roots extend to the turn of the century and the compassion and vision of one woman - Celia Burnett. In 1897, Burnett opened a boardinghouse for men who left their families in search of fortune in the West. These travelers often became ill, and Burnett nursed them back to health. As word of Burnett's boardinghouse spread, a group of Fresno physicians joined forces with her to found a private, for-profit hospital which served as the beginning of the Community Medical Centers legacy.

More than 100 years later, Community continues to thrive by providing health care to the people of the Central Valley. Community is the largest health care provider in the Valley with three acute-care hospitals, some 6,000 employees and 1,100 physicians.

Challenge

Prior to implementing Open Text Web Solutions, Community Medical Centers updated their entire site daily by hand coding and manually uploading changed pages.  The greatest challenge they faced was simply keeping up with the pace of changes that needed to be made to their site in a timely manner.  The Development and approval process was so convoluted that changes could not be made quickly and efficiently.

The Community Medical Centers Web site consists of nearly 400 pages that provide critical corporate, employment, patient and health news features news and information.

• Updated site daily manually, creating bottleneck issues
• Could not keep up with the pace and frequency of information that needed to be updated
• Approval process prior to posting was convoluted

Solution

Open Text Web Solutions was selected because of price, compatibility with existing development platforms and ease of use for the end user. It now enables Community Medical to eliminate the dependency on IT for daily maintenance of the site, and allows IT to create new sections of the site using a template approach, pushing ownership of the site to those parts of the business that are generating the content.
"Our mission at Community is to improve health within the community and to promote medical education," said Tim Brown, Director Business Systems, Community Medical Centers.  "[Open Text Web Solutions] is instrumental in helping us communicate the critical information that we need to share with our community.  Their vast tool set and ease of use is what appealed to us most.  We are confident that the system will enable us to update content on our site right away."

Open Text Web Solutions met the needs of Community Medical Centers and allowed them to efficiently maintain its high standards in several ways:

• Eliminated the dependency on the IT department for daily maintenance
• IT is able to create new sections of the site using the template approach
• It enables Community Medical to extend ownership of content to additional users

Results

Prior to implementing Web Solutions, two full-time IT employees were dedicated to updating the site in addition to any marketing departmental staff that was generating content.  IT has been almost entirely removed from the process of updating the site and is only involved when rolling out new sections for the first time.  Furthermore, technical resources have been freed up enabling the team to concentrate on other business initiatives.

Open Text Web Solutions also enabled Community Medical to have increased involvement and ownership from different parts of the organizations business. The turnaround time of site updates has decreased thus resulting in the organization securing the most current information made available to their community.

Community Medical is also now able to efficiently rollout new sections and features, resulting in a dynamic and information-rich Web presence.

• IT Department has almost entirely been removed from the updating process
• Technical resources have been liberated
• Turnaround time of posting information to the site has decreased dramatically
• Open Text Web Solutions has enabled Community Medical to more efficiently rollout new sections and features

Facts and Figures

URL: www.communitymedical.org/

Project time: 6 weeks from installation to go live.

Launch of the site: August 1, 2002

Volume of Site: Roughly half a million raw hits a month, 36,000 page views, 10,000 visits

RedDot server: Compaq Dual Pentium 4, 1.4ghz, 1 gig RAM

Live server: IBM Netfinity Dual Xeon 900mhz, 1 gig RAM