Turning complexity into a category leader.

Northstar ran eleven specialist clinics under one brand, each with its own referral pathway and each described in the language of the department rather than the patient. Referrers could not tell which clinic to send someone to, and patients arriving from search landed on pages that assumed clinical knowledge they did not have.

The site also failed basic accessibility checks, which for a healthcare provider is both an exclusion problem and a procurement one.

We restructured the site around conditions and referral pathways rather than internal departments, so both audiences could self-select in one step. Every clinical page was rewritten with a reviewer in the loop and versioning recorded in the CMS.

A lightweight patient portal replaced a PDF-and-email intake process, holding the minimum data required with audited access. Accessibility was rebuilt at component level and verified with screen-reader testing on every referral journey.

Referrals arrived at the right clinic without triage, and the intake team stopped re-keying forms. Organic traffic to condition pages more than doubled within two quarters as the new structure matched what people actually searched for.

The site now conforms to WCAG 2.2 AA with automated checks in CI, which unlocked two commissioning conversations that had previously stalled on accessibility evidence.