THE CLIENT
LifeLong Medical Care
Bringing High-Quality Websites to Under-Resourced Healthcare Systems
Building affordable, human-centered digital front doors for community care networks.
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Building affordable, human-centered digital front doors for community care networks.
LifeLong Medical Care is a Bay Area nonprofit that asserts all people have the right to receive the healthcare and support they need. Founded in 1976, it has evolved from one location to a network of health centers offering primary and urgent care, dental and mental health services, LifeLong also serves the community through the adult day and school-based health centers, mobile medical and dental vans, supportive housing programs, and a residential substance abuse recovery program. Across this network, it provides high-quality health care to an average of 61,000 underserved people each year, regardless of their ability to pay or immigration status.
LifeLong maximizes its impact on community health through access, quality, innovation, and influence. As it has grown, LifeLong has developed effective models of care for low-income seniors, people with disabilities, and families. It has also adopted innovative approaches to conditions like high-risk pregnancies. Their practices have earned national recognition, and other health centers often look to LifeLong as they develop their own services.
Exygy’s connection to LifeLong began when the need for digital access to services was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Safety net organizations such as LifeLong are now the first of many community health clinics that Exygy works with to increase access to social services.
Community health centers serve populations under the greatest health threats, yet are the most under-resourced. Along with personnel and facility limitations, many lack the funding and support for an accessible, intuitive, and easy to maintain website. LifeLong was facing this issue when it reached out to Exygy about rebuilding its site. They had three primary needs:
LifeLong Medical Care’s focus on health equity aligns strongly with Exygy’s commitment to social impact, so a new site was an appealing challenge. We also recognized that it represented a significant opportunity. This project could be a chance to address budget as a barrier to high-quality websites for many community health organizations. Exygy proposed a partnership with LifeLong Medical Care that would allow us to share the benefits of our work and bring effective websites to additional centers at an accessible cost. They agreed with our vision to develop their new site and assist in providing a powerful, cost-effective digital presence to more community health systems.
Exygy used Agile project management to complete 10 two-week project sprints, moving steadily from user research to website launch/post-launch support. To begin, we interviewed LifeLong personnel and Bay Area individuals with various languages, abilities, and health needs. This helped us to understand user behavior and needs and to incorporate insights from both sides of the health center’s website. Their feedback told us that LifeLong’s present site felt neglected and was not easy to use. Everyone wanted to see vibrant media and interactive components, to trust the information presented, and to offer a positive experience for both content users and editors.
Next, our content strategy came from a site audit and analytics to understand LifeLong’s site current layout and identify the most visited pages, content for migration, and additional needs (new copy, digital tools, etc.). Based on our findings, Exygy generated a new site architecture that ensured users would consistently experience easy-to-find, relevant, and well-governed content.
The following sprints shifted our focus to site creation and launch. Using a theme and page builder for WordPress, our team configured new page templates and content types that allowed for a robust build-out while adhering to LifeLong’s brand and style guidelines. We also installed 3rd party integrations for patient management, fundraising, marketing, and language translation tools.
Once the CMS templates were complete, LifeLong populated the new platform with revised copy meeting their organizational readability objectives for equitable access to website content. During the final sprints, Exygy worked with LifeLong on quality assurance and layout tweaks, then transitioned to the new site and extended post-launch support in summer 2021.
As we designed and built LifeLong’s new digital front door, we remained focused on finding ways to reuse the deliverables from this project for other care networks with a limited budget who are looking for similar support. These assets included commonly-needed templates and integrations for healthcare services, locations, and providers.
LifeLong’s new site exemplifies their unwavering belief that everyone deserves high-quality, comprehensive healthcare services and support. In less than three months, we helped LifeLong to move from an out-moded site to a user-centered, modern, mobile-compatible CMS that connects them with people from all walks of life. The site’s content and components are easily manageable by staff, and technical updates are automatically provided by an active open-source community. Overall, LifeLong’s new site is a digital presence that allows them to meet their goals for engaging their community, building organizational capacity, and providing a top-tier support and care network.
The ultimate goal of Exygy and LifeLong Medical Care’s partnership is to address the inequities that community health centers face as they serve people while operating on a limited budget. There are more than 1,400 community health centers in the US and many of them share this digital issue. Thanks to our work with LifeLong, Exygy has the capacity to affordably assist many of them by reusing the deliverables from this project for similar client engagements.
With the website redesign, we’ve made the website a digital doorway, or one-stop shop, to all things LifeLong Medical Care. The clean, modern design has paid off, even in the short time since the new site launched. People are accessing things easier. They’re no longer jumping through a bazillion hoops to get to where they need to go.
— Kyle Russ, LifeLong Medical Care
