Meridian Health · Healthcare · 2025
A patient portal people actually use
Research-led redesign of a regional clinic network's website and patient portal, cutting support calls and more than tripling organic traffic.
- Services
- UX research
- Web design & build
- SEO
- -63% appointment support calls
- +212% organic search traffic
- 3.1 min avg. time to book, from 9.4
The brief
Meridian runs eleven clinics. Their website was built for the organization chart, not for a person with a sore throat at 7am. Booking took nine minutes on average, the front desk fielded hundreds of calls a week that should have been self-serve, and the site was invisible for the local searches that bring in new patients.
What we did
- Research first. We watched 24 patients try to book, refill and find a location. Two issues caused most of the pain: the portal login wall appeared before people knew what they could do, and location pages didn’t answer the three questions everyone asked (hours, parking, which doctors).
- Information architecture. We rebuilt navigation around tasks (“Book”, “Refill”, “Find a clinic”, “Pay a bill”) and moved the login wall to the last possible step.
- Design & build. A calm, high-contrast interface tested with older patients and screen readers. Location pages became the best-performing pages on the site.
- SEO. Structured data for every clinic and practitioner, a content plan around symptoms and services, and a clean technical foundation.
The outcome
Booking time dropped from 9.4 minutes to just over 3. Appointment-related support calls fell by nearly two thirds, which freed the front desk to focus on people in the building. Organic traffic more than tripled in eight months, led by location and service pages that now rank in the top three for most of Meridian’s catchment.