Patient-portal replatform on Drupal + AWS, with an AI-assisted content migration pod.
Twelve sub-sites, 18,000 pages, four CMSes - consolidated onto a single Drupal 10 platform on AWS. Migration pod paired engineers with an AI editor that flagged duplicate, stale, and PHI-leaking content before publish.
What we walked into.
Twelve regional sub-sites across four CMSes - Drupal 7, two flavours of WordPress, and a homegrown PHP stack a previous vendor had abandoned. Eighteen thousand pages of clinical, marketing, and patient-portal content. A compliance team that had stopped trusting any of it.
The hospital's digital director had a board commitment to ship a unified portal in the year. Two prior vendors had pitched lift-and-shift migrations and walked. The internal team knew the real risk: PHI leaking into pages it shouldn't, and a migration that would silently strand half the clinical content.
"We'd been quoted lift-and-shift twice. What we actually needed was someone who'd read every page with us and tell us which ones shouldn't exist. The AI did the reading; their team did the judgment. Both mattered."
Experience, data, activation, optimization.
One Drupal 10 design system across patient-facing, clinician-facing, and marketing surfaces. Authoring interface restructured around clinical service lines, not org chart. WCAG 2.2 AA on launch.
Canonical content model that finally distinguished clinical pages from marketing pages from portal pages. A single source of truth for service-line metadata that the CRM and the call-center team now read from too.
Patient-portal sign-up, appointment-request, and bill-pay flows rebuilt with measurement on every step. Conversion lifted on three of four flows in the first quarter.
AI-assisted content audit that runs weekly post-launch - flags pages drifting on accuracy, accessibility, or PHI exposure before they go stale. Owned by the compliance team, not by us.
The engagement, phase by phase.
- 01Week 0–4
Discovery + content audit
Crawled all 18k pages. Built the content inventory, the PHI-exposure heat map, and the migration scoring rubric the compliance team signed off on.
- 02Week 5–10
Design system + content model
Co-designed the component library with the brand team. Locked the content model with clinical and marketing leads in the same room - a first for them.
- 03Week 11–24
AI-assisted migration pod
Two engineers + an AI editor ran the migration in waves. Editor flagged duplicates, stale pages, and PHI risk; humans cleared every flag before publish. 94% auto-migrated; 6% rewritten.
- 04Week 25–32
Launch + hand-off
Phased cutover by service line. Zero PHI incidents in the 90 days post-launch. Stewardship handed to internal team on a documented runbook + weekly content audit.
The stack and the pod.
- CMS
- Drupal 10
- Hosting
- AWS · multi-AZ
- Search
- OpenSearch
- Edge
- CloudFront + WAF
- AI tooling
- Custom content-audit agent · in-house
- 1× Engagement Director
- 1× Tech Architect (Drupal)
- 2× Senior Engineers
- 1× UX + design system lead
- 1× Content strategist
- 1× AI/ML engineer (audit agent)
- 1× QA lead