one digital ecosystem in place of 300 scattered sites, and $1.7m saved every year.
Consolidating a top academic medical center’s sprawl into a single component-based system its internal teams could run, without losing the mission underneath it.
Over the years, Michigan Medicine had grown to more than 300 separate websites. Each one was built by a different team, on a different system, in a different style. For one of the top academic medical centers in the country, that meant a fragmented experience for patients, students, and researchers, a lot of duplicated effort inside the organization, and a digital brand that didn’t match the scale of the work behind it.
The ask was to reimagine the whole digital ecosystem so it worked for everyone it served at once: patients looking for care, researchers pushing the science forward, students looking for a way in. I led the creative direction on a digital language that felt modern, trustworthy, and clear, and paired it with a component-based system so internal teams could keep building on their own without the brand drifting apart again. The mission stayed at the center of it. “Our discoveries change care. Our care changes lives” had to come through everywhere: the design, the photography, the flow, and the words together.
The organization moved from 300-plus silos to a single system its teams could actually run. Sunsetting and consolidating the legacy sites saved more than $1.7 million a year, and the digital presence finally matched the institution’s reputation.
300+
$1.7m/yr
1.
