Feature
The Gist
- Authentication-first personalization. WellSpan redesigned its digital experience so patients get tailored, HIPAA-compliant content only after logging in.
- AI as augmentation and automation. Senior Director of Digital Experience Lissa Richards says AI is helping WellSpan increase human capacity across clinical and marketing teams.
- Faster, unified experience. WellSpan saw a 20% jump in new user accounts and can now roll out new integrations every two weeks.
For WellSpan Health, a nonprofit health system serving Pennsylvania, digital experience isn’t just about convenience — it’s about reflecting how the organization delivers care.
Lissa Richards, senior director of digital experience of the nonprofit health system in Pennsylvania with 11 hospitals and 23,000 team members, led a team that redesigned wellspan.org on Sitecore. The goal was to create a seamless, personalized and secure experience that mirrors WellSpan’s commitment to treating each patient as “one-size-fits-one.”
“WellSpan is truly seeking to differentiate ourselves based on delivering the most personalized experiences in healthcare,” Richards said. “We as an organization are all in on delivering one-size-fits-one experience. It's kind of the phrase that we use and that absolutely was going to apply to digital. We knew that we had to be able to personalize the digital experience.”
Editor's note: CMSWire will be on the ground at the Sitecore Symposium in Orlando, Fla., next month and will be capturing the latest in digital experience innovation like WellSpan's. We'll be getting the tales from the providers and practitioners doing the work.
Table of Contents
- From Fragmented Tools to a Unified Platform
- Building Personalization With Ethics in Mind
- AI that Augments, Not Replaces, the Human Touch
- Continuous Improvement and Future Personalization
From Fragmented Tools to a Unified Platform
Before the redesign, patients faced a patchwork of disconnected digital tools — a common pain point across healthcare systems. Users needed to visit many different platforms to find doctors, register for events, or access records.
It wasn't exactly smooth on the backend for those creating digital experiences, either. Some sites were outsourced, others homegrown and few shared data or branding.
“We had our main website, our patient portal, another site for events — you kind of get the idea,” she said. “Every time we needed something new, it was almost like starting from scratch.”
To address that internal fragmentation — and cumbersome digital experience for patients and visitors — WellSpan rebuilt its digital presence on Sitecore XM and Sitecore Personalize, using a headless architecture powered by React and Next.js. Integrations with Epic MyChart and Prove identity software now give patients a consistent and secure login experience. The system automatically verifies users via phone, dramatically simplifying account creation — a change Richards said directly fueled a 20% increase in new user accounts within two months of launch.
“We made it a lot easier to create an account,” Richards said. “You just type in your phone number and date of birth, you get a little ping on your phone ... and it fills in all the information for you. It does the identity verification in the background. All you do is click through and you’ve got an account.”
Related Article: Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs): What to Know in 2025
Building Personalization With Ethics in Mind
Richards’ team approached personalization with a deliberate sense of privacy — a must in healthcare, where user behavior can reveal sensitive details. Unlike retail-style tracking, WellSpan’s personalization only activates after a user logs in.
“For us, we decided that personalization was going to happen behind authentication,” Richards said. “Once you can log in to wellspan.org, we customize the home screen to actually pull some of that patient data for you. So we’ll show you if you’ve got upcoming appointments, test results to look at, messages — all integrated with Epic’s MyChart.”
WellSpan’s digital platform also includes social-style engagement tools, allowing users to “favorite” things like doctors, articles and events. Those selections help power personalized recommendations for logged-in patients — all within the boundaries of HIPAA compliance. According to Sitecore, that approach has led to more than 18,000 items saved as favorites across six million annual site visits.
AI that Augments, Not Replaces, the Human Touch
AI is real for WellSpan’s innovation strategy. Richards described two guiding principles: automation (to remove friction and repetitive tasks) and augmentation (to empower teams and patients alike).
“AI isn’t just one thing — it’s providing value across our organization for both our teams and our patients,” she said. “We’re always going to be understaffed in healthcare, and anything we can do to help our clinicians, our nurses perform ... to strip away some of the tasks that something else can do ... we're really focused on applying AI in a way that can increase our human capacity to help us deliver better experiences to our patients.”
In marketing, her team used AI to accelerate content creation during the wellspan.org rebuild. They implemented an AI tool, taught it their brand standards, their voice and tone, and even their page templates, Richards said. “That made us more efficient at writing what came up on the web," Richards said.
Richards added that WellSpan is also exploring specialized healthcare language models such as Hippocratic, which she said are “trained on hundreds and thousands of hours of actual live human patient and clinician interactions. I don't think ChatGPT can say the same thing.” Such domain-specific AI, she noted, can provide safer and more reliable context for patients viewing their own results online.
Related Article: Want Real AI Impact in Digital Experience? Fix Your Data Silos
How WellSpan Values Digital Experience
This table summarizes the key pillars of WellSpan Health’s digital transformation, showing how technology and human-centered design work together to improve patient engagement and organizational efficiency.
| Focus Area | Action or Technology | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication-first personalization | Secure login-based experiences integrated with Epic MyChart and identity verification | HIPAA-compliant personalization and 20% increase in new user accounts |
| AI-driven augmentation | AI tools for radiography, HR, and content generation; partnership with healthcare-specific LLMs like Hippocratic | Faster workflows, improved diagnostic accuracy, and better patient communication |
| Unified digital ecosystem | Rebuilt web architecture with shared data, design templates and agile DevOps cycles | Consistent brand experience and two-week release cycles for new integrations |
| Ethical personalization | Recommendations and “favorites” only after login to protect patient privacy | 18,000+ saved items and higher patient engagement without compromising compliance |
| Continuous improvement model | Agile development and iterative personalization based on user segments | Adaptive, data-informed experiences that evolve with patient needs |
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Continuous Improvement and Future Personalization
Since going live, WellSpan’s web team has adopted agile development cycles, releasing updates every two weeks. Recent rollouts include integration with the organization’s event management system and a virtual primary care product that determines patient eligibility automatically when logged in.
It’s all part of what Richards calls a “continuous improvement model” — one that blends technology, ethics and empathy.
Looking ahead, Richards said her team is focused on segment-based personalization. “Imagine if we can tell that you fall into a segment of folks who logs in and is very self-service oriented,” she said. “Your homepage experience could be different than someone who’s more interested in reading articles or learning about services.”
