Alberta Health Services

The Client

Alberta Health Services is the health care provider for the 3.5 million residents of the province of Alberta, and one of the largest employers in Canada with more than 90,000 employees.

AHS’s vision is to become the best performing publicly funded health system in Canada. They have a progressive action plan to improve the quality of patient care, reduce hospital wait times, and increase the availability of health services, support, and information for Albertans.

They understand the importance of information technology to their success, and wanted a web presence that could help Albertan citizens and health care providers get timely and accurate information about their health care system.

The Problem

Alberta Health Services was established in 2008, when nine regional health authorities were amalgamated into one “super board.” The new AHS website had to contain information about every health care facility and program in Alberta. Creating it meant combing through the local data and content from each regional health authority site, and centralizing it into a single content management system.

The Solution

As the web technology vendor, Yellow Pencil worked with Alberta Health Services to plan, test and deploy new solutions using Open Text WSM. The new AHS website allows content authors from across the province to publish content and manage information from an Oracle data source updated nightly.

Our team worked with AHS to create a data migration strategy and a data import routine so that the entire metadata-driven albertahealthservices.ca website can be updated nightly from a data source managed provincially by a team of data stewards, and published to the production website.

The Results

Since the successful launch of the website in 2009, Yellow Pencil has continued to provide product and technical support to the AHS web and communication team for issues ranging from network performance right through to social media deployment. Our comprehensive range of services around web channel delivery means that AHS can connect with a network specialist, a visual designer, a mobile specialist, a social media expert, a user experience consultant, a content strategist or a search marketing practitioner all through one point of contact.

Our support model makes customers successful through education and facilitation. Alberta Health Services has been able to deliver web content successfully for 3 years, relying primarily on internal resources to manage costs, but engaging Yellow Pencil to ensure that their team has access to product expertise when necessary.

Now that’s a healthy relationship.