Lusíadas: a new digital experience for customers

The Challenge

Lusíadas Saúde is a reference group in the health sector in Portugal with more than 7000 professionals. Inserted in a very competitive market, Lusíadas focus on ensuring that customers (patients) feel in good hands, not only for their excellence, rigour and innovation, but for the attention in the smallest of details. To support this vision, Lusíadas seeks to use the most advanced technologies on behalf of the patients.

Founded in 1998, Lusíadas Saúde has always stood out for its innovative vision, combined with a strong spirit of continuous improvement, as well as for its sustained growth and the expansion of its assistance network throughout the country. At the end of 2022, Lusíadas Saúde joined the French group Vivalto Santé. Created in 2009 by Daniel Caille, Vivalto Santé is the third largest private hospitalisation group in France and one of the largest players in private healthcare in Europe, as a result of recent internationalisation that has allowed it to double its activity. Vivalto Santé currently has a network of 91 healthcare units in six countries – France, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Slovakia and the Czech Republic – and has a turnover of around 2.2 billion euros.

Because Lusíadas sees the use of the most advanced technologies as a vector on behalf of their customers, the company decided that it was time to refresh their online presence. It was identified that general users were seeking for an enhanced digital experience (on appointments, for example), and the number of people searching for content related to healthcare on the internet was increasing. 

The website had low user acquisition rates, it was outdated and needed improvement on the user experience. On the other hand, Lusíadas had a blog & knowledge centre detached from the website with good acquisition (access). But, because it was detached from the corporate website, Lusíadas was not maximising the blog access on its behalf.

From this context, two specific challenges were identified:

• Increase the website acquisition (access),
• Improve the general user experience, but mostly when appointments were made. Lusíadas already had that feature in its older website, but the UI/UX was outdated and needed an improvement at the look & feel.

The Solution

The Devoteam Creative Tech team came up with the idea of relaunching the Lusíadas Saúde website, creating a whole new experience for users.

The key aspects of this project that addressed the most important challenges identified were: the integration between corporate website with the blog (to increase acquisition); and the implantation of new functionalities that would improve the user experience in many aspects, but particularly for the appointments with doctors and exams.

The technology chosen to develop the refreshed website was Drupal, an open-source content management system (CMS) that would unlock many possibilities of development and integration. The key aspects of the solution developed by Devoteam Creative Tech were:

• Design of an interface & layout customised and adjusted to the Lusíadas identity,
• Integration with internal CRM and other Lusíadas microservices,
• Development of a general internal search segmented by doctors, specialties and content categories
• Architecture optimisation between institutional, promotional, informational transactional and other pages,
• New functionalities to increase acquisition traffic and its retention such as new forms, marketing operations tools, geolocation customisation, page & content automation through APIs.