Northwest Community Hospital Web Site

Northwest Community Hospital is committed to continous quality improvement. To better serve the community it redesigned its web site, adding a number of features to increase individual access to health information.

As part of this effort we programmed several features of the new site, and assisted in launching the new design. We created the "Quality Report Card" and "My NCH" features. We also integrated the Google Search Appliance ™.

The "Quality Report Card" provides a comparison of NCH's patient outcomes with state and national averages in a variety of areas. The site computes the results from survey data and is regularly updated by the hospital through an administrative interface.

“My NCH” provides medical articles and media customized to a website visitor’s interests. We wrote server code that pulls the medical content from an external provider via a web service interface and incorporates it into the web site. This allows the hospital to have new and updated content without additional maintenance.

Using the Google Search Appliance ™ NCH provides excellent access to its site content, both the content it hosts and externally provided content such as the "Health Library" and "My NCH" features. We configured the appliance to index both internal and external content. We also styled the display of results by modifying the xslt document that the appliance uses to generate results.