Beyond the Brief: Building a Better Digital Healthcare Experience

The Challenge: More Than a Website Redesign

The project began in early 2025 with a seemingly straightforward request: improve the visual design and appointment-booking experience of a hospital website.

But as we started exploring the client's needs, it became clear that the challenge went far beyond design.

Acibadem City Clinic operates across multiple hospitals, each with its own departments, medical specialists, services and relationships between pieces of information. Patients need to find reliable information and book appointments easily. Meanwhile, internal teams need a practical way to keep that information accurate and up to date.

What started as a redesign evolved into a broader initiative: creating a consistent digital experience across a central portal and six hospital websites, while accounting for the different needs, workflows and stakeholders involved.

The challenge wasn't simply to build better-looking websites. It was to understand how the organisation worked and create a solution that worked for the people behind it - and the patients relying on it.

Understanding the Problem Behind the Brief

We believe good engineering starts with asking the right questions.

Instead of treating the initial requirements as a fixed checklist, our team took the time to understand the client's day-to-day operations, identify friction points and explore how people actually interacted with the existing digital experience.

That meant looking beyond the interface. We examined how patients navigate medical information, how appointment booking works in practice and how internal teams manage the content patients depend on.

We even went through the appointment-booking process ourselves, contacting the reception unit to better understand the experience from a patient's perspective.

This discovery work helped us look at the project as a product problem, not just a development task. It gave us a clearer picture of what needed to be improved, which details mattered most and where a more thoughtful solution could make a difference.

Taking Ownership, Not Just Taking Tickets

Our role wasn't limited to implementing requests. We took responsibility for understanding the broader objective and helping the client reach the best possible solution.

That meant anticipating needs, identifying potential issues early and proposing improvements before they became explicit requirements. It also meant challenging assumptions when a different approach could better serve the people using the product.

One important example was the content management system.

The existing platform, Sitefinity, was more complex than the client's needs warranted and required a recurring subscription, while only a limited portion of its functionality was being used. Rather than automatically extending the existing setup, we explored what the team genuinely needed and proposed a custom CMS tailored to its workflows.

The goal was not to introduce more technology for the sake of it. It was to give the client a practical, manageable solution without the ongoing cost of a Sitefinity subscription.

We applied the same thinking throughout the project: understand the underlying need, consider the available options and recommend an approach that makes sense in the real world.

For us, ownership means caring about whether the solution works - not just whether the task is marked as complete.

Making Complexity Manageable

Building a digital experience across multiple hospitals involves more than replicating a template.

Each website has its own content structure, departments, specialists, services and relationships between information. Some areas are particularly complex, with extensive information and multiple layers of links that need to remain clear and accessible.

The project also brought together stakeholders from marketing, HR, IT and individual hospitals. They had different priorities, perspectives and expectations. Decision-makers changed during the process, and new stakeholders had to be brought on board along the way.

Progress depended on more than technical execution. It required patience, clear communication and a shared understanding of what was being built and why.

Our teams in Sofia and Varna worked in sync, using regular meetings and written communication to keep decisions clear, coordinate feedback and maintain momentum.

We worked to make the complexity manageable - both in the digital product itself and in the process of delivering it.

A Solution the Client Can Actually Use

A successful product is not just one that launches. It is one that the people responsible for it can confidently use, maintain and develop further.

The new CMS was designed around the client's practical needs, enabling the marketing team to manage website content such as doctor profiles, departments, news and other information without relying on developers for every routine update.

We also invested in preparing and populating the website content, aiming to deliver a solution that was as close to ready for everyday use as possible - not simply a finished design waiting for the client to do the rest.

After the initial training sessions, the marketing team was able to use the new CMS, with early feedback highlighting its ease of use.

The patient-facing experience brings together medical information and appointment booking, helping visitors find the relevant information, choose a specialist and proceed with the booking process.

The result is a digital foundation designed to support both sides of the experience: patients looking for clear information and internal teams responsible for keeping it current.

A Product That Continues to Evolve

The websites are live, and our work continues beyond the initial delivery. Algorithmity supports the platform and is developing new features as the client's needs evolve.

That ongoing relationship reflects how we approach engineering partnerships. We don't see delivery as the end of our responsibility. We stay engaged, learn from how the product is used in the real world and help the solution develop in the right direction.

The project began with a request to improve a website's appearance. It grew because we looked beyond that request, invested in understanding the organisation and took ownership of the challenges we uncovered.

For us, that's what makes the difference between simply delivering software and building a product that truly works.