Health First. One Drupal Platform for Health First Care and Coverage.

Baseline: Measured in User Behavior

Before redesigning anything, Vardot ran a discovery program against the live site using Hotjar feedback, Semrush, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, task analysis, and a heuristic evaluation against Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics.

Vardot's discovery program measured the cost. Hotjar survey respondents reported:

• 2.9 out of 5 average ease-of-use rating
• 91% did not find what they were looking for
• 86% rated search very difficult
• 70% found it very difficult to locate a doctor
• 1.4 out of 5 for reaching Login to Account and Pay My Bill

The SEO audit added 690 pages without an H1, 178 missing or duplicate meta descriptions, 18 duplicate title tag issues, and 29 images without alt text.

The Challenge

One Drupal site was being asked to do two different jobs for two different audiences, and was succeeding at neither.

Patients looking for a doctor, a location, or a bill-pay link were running into navigation built for hospital marketers. Health Plans members and prospects looking to enroll, find a covered provider, or download plan documents were buried under healthcare content. 

The two experiences shared a header that contradicted itself page to page, a search index that returned news articles ahead of the actual service pages, and an information architecture that asked every visitor to first figure out which kind of Health First they had come for.

Health First needed a rebuild that respected both audiences without splitting the brand, and it needed it before the next Medicare open enrollment window.

Goals

• Faster Task Completion: Cut the time it takes for a patient or member to complete a primary task — find a provider, find a plan, pay a bill, log in.
• Unified Role-based Experience: Give the Health Care side and the Health Plans side each its own coherent experience, without fragmenting Health First as an organization.
• SEO & Discoverability: Fix the SEO foundation so the right page ranks for the right intent, not a news article from three years ago.
• Modern Drupal Foundation: Bring the platform to current Drupal standards (Drupal 11, WCAG 2.1 AA, schema.org, mobile-first) and give the marketing team a content model they can actually scale with.
• Open Enrollment Readiness: Launch the platform before the October open enrollment period.

Treated Discovery as a Deliverable

Before any design or code, we ran structured workshops with Health First's marketing, communications, and digital teams; a market and navigation benchmark against peer healthcare and insurance providers; a heuristic UX audit against the full site; task and user-flow mapping for every priority journey (find a service, find a location, find a provider, access member portal, shop a plan, enroll as a broker); and a full SEO audit using Semrush, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics.

The discovery report itself became the source of truth for every downstream decision — every requirement in the build PRD traces back to a quantified finding from this phase.

Choosing the Right Structure

We presented three architectural routes — one unified menu, one site with separate menus per audience, and two fully separate sites — each with prototypes, trade-offs, and a side-by-side technical implementation matrix (CMS, user access, design, SEO authority, cost, scalability, domains).

Health First selected the middle path: one Drupal codebase, one domain, with a splash entry page at hf.org that routes visitors into either the Health Care experience or the Health Plans experience, each with its own menu, content, and theming, but a shared content model and editorial governance.

This kept SEO authority consolidated under a single domain while letting each audience get a navigation built for them.

Rebuilding the Information Architecture

We rewrote the sitemap from the ground up. Navigation is now grouped by audience segment (Member Resources, Provider Resources, Broker Resources) and user intent (Care & Services, Patient Resources, Your Wellness), with menu labels written in user language — not medical jargon, not marketing copy. Breadcrumbs are consistent across both experiences. The "menu position rule" is applied site-wide so visitors always know where they are.

Rebuilt Search

The previous search returned news articles ahead of the service page users were looking for, ignored Health Plans content in its filters, and returned zero results for terms like "Login." 

We replaced it with a unified site-wide search featuring predictive auto-suggestions, popular search terms, visible filter selection chips, specialized search modes (locations, services, news, documents), redesigned result cards with content-type tags, and improved relevance ranking — standardized across both experiences.

A Searchable Document Library

Health Plans members were previously hunting through tabbed accordions for plan documents, brochures, and forms. 

We built a centralized, filterable Documents & Forms Library as a Drupal view that pulls eligible documents from multiple content types, with filters for plan type, document type, year, language, and benefit; clear file-type and update-date indicators; previews; and direct download CTAs.

Other Deliverables

Accessibility

The new platform is built to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Heading hierarchy, focus states, color contrast, alt text, keyboard navigation, and ARIA usage are part of the component contract.

Automated Content Migration

Eligible content was migrated automatically. Vardot's team manually re-published 50 priority items where structure or sensitivity warranted hands-on attention, and Health First's editors got training and direct access to upload the remainder.

SEO Fundamentals

We addressed the 690 missing H1 tags, the 130 missing meta descriptions, the duplicate titles, and the missing alt text — and built a content model that prevents those gaps from re-opening. Title and meta-description patterns are now templated per content type. Structured data is generated automatically.

Built the theme in Single Directory Components on Drupal 11

The new theme is built using Drupal's Single Directory Components (SDC) pattern — every component lives in one folder with its template, styles, JavaScript, and configuration colocated. The site was simultaneously upgraded to Drupal 11. The design system covers a full block library, four core layout principles (consistent heading hierarchy, simplified flow, contextual design patterns, mobile-first responsive proportions), and revamped media headers, payment paths, and primary care-and-plan landing pages.

Refined Content Types, Taxonomies, and Schema

We cleaned up duplicate and deprecated content types (Basic Pages, Landing Pages, Events, Services), introduced a dedicated Health Plan content type that the previous site lacked despite Health Plans being half the business, and standardized URL patterns:

• /services/[service-name]
• /doctors/[doctor-name]
• /locations/[facility-name]
• /health-plans/[plan-name]

Every content type is mapped to a schema.org type — Article, Event, MedicalOrganization, Person, HealthPlan — so search engines can render rich results.

Taxonomies were consolidated to a core working set (Article Type, Medical Category, Event Type, Facility Type, Document Category) and wired into the content model.

Results

The new hf.org won the Healthcare category at the International Splash Awards 2026. 

An independent jury judged entries on business case, technology, strategy, design and user experience, quality of execution, innovation, and community value.

What Health First has now:

• One entry point and two purpose-built experiences, on one codebase and one domain
• Health Plans products as first-class content, with their own content type and structured data
• Search that returns the service page first, with filters for each audience
• A Documents and Forms Library in place of tab-and-accordion hunting
• 915 SEO issues closed, with templates that keep them closed
• A Drupal 11 platform built to WCAG 2.1 AA, ready for continued iteration

The site launched ahead of Medicare open enrollment. Vardot will report post-launch user metrics against the discovery baseline, starting with ease of use, search, and the provider and plan journeys.