After months of meetings, brainstorms, research, coding, writing, editing, shooting videos, designing and dreaming, High Road was excited to be a part of the official launch of BrighterLife.ca.

A content marketing site powered by Sun Life Financial (a High Road client for the last four years), BrighterLife.ca is designed to deliver relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage an audience in a way that avoids jargon and a hard sales push. The content is all presented in plain language and focuses on topics people think about– family, health, money, working life and retirement.

BrighterLife.ca invites everyone to get involved – by reading, posing question to its columnists, contributing ideas and experiences, answering poll questions and sharing insights with those who face similar challenges.

High Road is proud to be a part of the BrighterLife.ca launch, and looks forward to working closely with Sun Life as the site continues to expand.

 Check it out at http://brighterlife.ca and in French at http://simplementbrillant.ca/.

Last month, High Road was proud to attend the unveiling of The Ottawa Hospital’s brand new website.

The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) worked with High Road to enhance the way it digitally supports its patients and community. The Hospital’s vision is to “provide world-class care, exceptional service and compassion we would want for our loved ones”, and High Road’s innovative and personalized approach to online communications helped bring this vision to life.

The hospital has three campuses in Ottawa serving 1.2 million Ontario residents. Although the name implies a local hospital, TOH reaches more than just the Ottawa community, with 1,172 beds, a research institute, a foundation and more than 26 departments, including a renowned Cancer Program.

This was a challenging, but incredibly important project for us.

High Road’s objective: to create a seamless, integrated online experience for a diverse number of audiences. The result: a website that connects The Ottawa Hospital brand with patients and its partners at the Research Institute and The Foundation, as well as the more than 26 departments, programs, services and clinics.

From the beginning of the project, TOH’s vision guided High Road’s research into the field of patient care, healthcare and overall communications in this sector. We met with a diverse range of stakeholders, both internal and external, ranging from physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals, to patients, volunteers, and other supporters. These conversations helped our team understand what everyone needed the website to provide: adequate and engaging resources as well as support.

A best-practices review of leading hospital web sites and social media properties also helped us set strategic priorities to promote awareness and support for the hospital’s new vision, and raise the overall profile of its clinical departments and programs.

The hospital’s website, www.ottawahospital.on.ca, is now very welcoming and designed to meet both of the patients’ and visitors’ needs.

Here is a quick snapshot of some of the new features:

• The website is fully accessible and enriched with well-organized information;
• Interactive campus maps are used to profile directions, parking and overall accessibility;
• Visitors can now connect with appropriate departments seamlessly via a searchable directory;
• Family physicians, healthcare specialists and visitors can browse TOH’s physician directory to direct their questions accordingly;
• Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have been introduced, allowing TOH to stay connected to the healthcare community and offer up news updates and announcements to the public.

We worked very closely with TOH’s internal technical team and their partners to integrate the design and site structure into a new content management system (CMS) that now allows TOH to manage online communications effectively across all departments.

Congratulations to The Ottawa Hospital for having launched such a demanding project.

The final product looks great (and we are excited to see it evolve over time)!

The Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF) recently teamed up with High Road to refresh its online presence – and the result is more than just a new coat of paint.  With the launch of this new site, CHSRF will be talking to its audience about what matters most: the state of Canada’s healthcare system.

The CHSRF’s mandate is to strengthen healthcare in Canada by engaging and supporting citizens, accelerating evidence-informed change, and promoting policy dialogue.  With the new CHSRF.ca, the independent, not-for-profit group has become a great example of how organizations can take advantage of online tools to better engage stakeholders and foster a strong sense of community in its audience to truly drive change.

Developed with the goal of encouraging national dialogue and debate between health services partners, academia, media and researchers, the rebranded site is the product of extensive stakeholder consultations and a social media audit.

CHSRF.ca  invites visitors to join in on the healthcare conversation through both Facebook and Twitter, and visitors can also contribute to and stay up to date with CHSRF through the community page, which features recent news and health updates,  as well as a Twitter feed from CHSRF’s customized community list.

Visitors can also easily view CHSRF’s extensive content library through a robust tagging system (including tag clouds) which allow visitors to quickly access the exact information they need. This was made possible through the implementation of a more flexible, customizable content management system (CMS).

The new CHSRF site will now be a thriving online hub to connect healthcare thinkers with healthcare doers – a space that is sure to contribute to the ongoing development of the Canadian healthcare system.