Health Karma scales up content for virtual healthcare

Health Karma was frustrated by the time and opportunities lost to ticket-based content publishing.

“From the developer side, we were hired to work on interesting algorithms and solve complex problems, but every so often a ticket came in that said to capitalize this letter or add a comma here,” said Eddie Solar, senior vice president of development at Health Karma. “That work has to be done, but isn’t there a better way to do it? That was one of the issues that led us to use a headless CMS.”

The pain of this back-and-forth publishing process was felt on the marketing side as well. “Marketing would request a new page, but because everything had to go through sprint planning, it would be at least two weeks before it was ready,” Solar said. “By that time, they often decided to go a different route or had already missed the opportunity”.

Using Contentstack, Health Karma first built a basic template that allowed marketing to change the header, button and body copy of a page. Next, the development team created different content module templates — like a paragraph, video or three-column module — that marketers could choose from to build out a page on their own.

“Developers can now focus on the problem solving they’re hired for, like how to integrate with over 2,000 different insurance plans or how to take in data and personalize the experience, and marketers can focus on adding value, building visibility and attracting new visitors,” says Michael Swartz, president at Health Karma.

Optimization at scale

“The way we build an experience for an older or younger person, for someone with or without insurance, that’s going to be different,” Swartz said. “We can have variations of the same feature, but the way it feels, the way it speaks, the way it messages is totally different.

“We really have to flip the script on the language of healthcare, and Contentstack gives us the ability to do it."

Health Karma created a content model with reusable Contentstack templates that let the team quickly spin up content variants. For example, A/B testing 25 iterations of a campaign registration page in just two weeks, as well as easily creating Spanish and Creole versions via integrations with translation.com.

“The more we build in Contentstack, the more personalization we can offer, and the more scalable deployments we can do,” Swartz said.

A modular approach to security

Keeping customers’ personal data private and secure is a top priority for Health Karma. “We know that different parts of our system could be touching personal data, so we built our whole infrastructure to be modular," Swartz said. "This means we can select which features have access to which data, and can turn off a feature that just isn’t working without breaking the system.

“Contentstack allows us to execute on this infrastructure from a content standpoint,” he continued. “It gives us the ability to set up content and data flows in a way that lets us optimize and personalize at scale while keeping data safe."

Building for the future

As more people become comfortable with more parts of life becoming digital, such as talking to a doctor, the healthcare industry is facing rapid technology change and adoption.

“If a new technology comes out and the infrastructure we’re using is not compatible, then we have to reinvest a lot of time making it work,” Swartz said. “So one of our criteria for potential partners is that they aren’t just looking at the status quo but have an eye for innovation, growth and scalability.

“We found that Contentstack was already moving in the direction we want to go, such as the use of GraphQL, and I believe it will be in front of the technology innovations that come out in the coming years. With Contenstack, we can have our content in one place, regardless of what it’s connected to, and that helps keep us future-proof.”