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Making action easy with connected patient experiences 
The Healthcare system is worn thin in the wake of the grueling COVID-19 pandemic. There’s no shortage of perspectives on how to revolutionize care teams, connect technology to patients, and reel the system back to safety. And yet – this situation demands urgent action, starting with a patient/member-centric approach to behavior change. 

Let’s tackle health inertia in a people-first use case: closing gap(s) in care by end of Q2 2023.  Waiting for systemic change will be too late. Providers, payers and health plans alike can take simple steps to engage these patients in their own care, right now.  
Here's a key insight: 
People are skipping primary and preventative care at alarming rates - down 10.3% since before the COVID-19 pandemic. That means high-cost cancers undetected. Diabetes undiagnosed. And cardiopulmonary diseases advancing on unsuspecting people. Gap in care closure was already a key component of value-based care. Now getting patients into primary care for screenings and vaccinations is even more critical. But with so many healthcare customers more comfortable on their couch than in their physician’s office, how will we create action?  
"More than 40 percent of U.S. adults delayed or avoided medical care in June 2020, according to a weekly report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now, nearly a year-and-a-half later, pandemic-induced delays in preventive care and routine screenings continue to exacerbate patient care gaps." 
 
Here’s our opportunity: 
Let’s say our goal – across payer and provider teams - is to accelerate all patients to pre-pandemic levels of primary and preventative care. Quite simply, our patients need to know it’s in their best interest, and our system must support action with ease. 
First, we’ll start by identifying patients or plan members with a lapse in primary and preventive care.  

    For payers, this means referencing current and historic claims data. For providers, it’s data that should come from your EHR.  
    
    
    You’ll want to look at the data in aggregate, as well as have correlative demographic and location-based intersection points.  
    Then, if you’ve not already done this for previous marketing work, determine what anonymous member ID you can use to keep PHI secure. 

Second, be intentional about the path-to-action for the customer. 

    Build your text or email campaign with a click-to-act strategy: land the customer on a concise experience that frames the desired actions (a primary care visit, any possible gaps in care in an authenticated and HIPAA compliant manner). No upsells or distractions here. 
    Starting with an outbound call center? Fill the service representative’s terminal with the same, actionable information. 
    If a patient or plan member already has a care provider on file, highlight that information.  
    Better yet, create a set filter feature on your provider-finder that launches with providers taking new patients, within a reasonable radius to the customer’s typical location. And showcase the top three to five. Our attention spans have gotten shorter – more scrolling means less action.  
    Build or license interactive tools that make it easy for the customer to schedule their care.  
    The health system needs to rebuild trust with this audience. Use a journey-building tool in your marketing operations to efficiently send automated follow-ups based on a patient’s interaction with your digital toolset. 

Third, plan on price transparency messaging.

    Confirm by customer segment and insurance plan what precise primary and preventative care are covered. Over 40% of Americans have skipped out on care (routine, for illness and otherwise) because they were worried about the cost. Clarify what’s covered and dispel their concerns. 


    If you’ve got an uninsured segment for whom you can’t confirm costs, consider a referral to your state health office and/or exchange, instead. 

Even in the first launch, plan on basic audience segmentation and message testing 

    For example, you may want to target those without primary care in two years differently than those who only skipped one. You’ll think about Medicare and Commercial plan members differently. And so on. 
    Keep it simple at this stage. Just get one or two variables to test for each audience segment. We’re just building the muscle for content personalization at scale.  
    Get multiple content options through your legal and compliance teams upfront, so you can test and evolve more rapidly once in-market. 

Use CX strategies to measure the impact of your work internally.  

    Can we measure the impact to scheduled visits?  
    Can we measure the impact to closed gaps in care? 
    What other patient feedback can we gather? 

Evolution

Gaps in care has always been a challenge with health equity at the heart. While primary care visits are down as noted earlier, middle class white women have been the first to return to their annual well-care appointments. Health plans and providers will want to think creatively about the strategies for non-white, lower-income audiences in subsequent phases.   

By starting with the end in mind, we will build a concise platform that puts the customer and their health at the center. Stitching together the right data points, we can send messages that are relevant, provide secure experiences that are actionable – and can create paths to value that are measurable.  Interested in learning more about how you can make action easy for your patients? Our team of experts are here to help!
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Making action easy with connected patient experiences 

Overcoming roadblocks to digital transformation in the CPG industry 
Recently, Deloitte published a digital maturity curve and outlined where a large contingency of CPG companies fall on the spectrum. Generally, what they found is that most CPG organizations are either passively digital or exploring digital. Which boils down to a slow progress into operating the business and customer experience with digital as a pillar to the model. Comparatively, the CPG industry is slightly behind other industries with harnessing customer data and deriving insights from them to influence buying decisions.  
Competitive encroachment from digital-native DTC brands 
Interestingly is that many organizations that are prioritizing digital, have developed roadmaps with identified initiatives to modernize their martech stack, digital capabilities and internal processes; but have yet to realize those plans and brought them to bear. So, what’s dragging CPG companies and slowing them down from moving the needle on getting closer to digital transformation? 

Progress in the CPG industry has been impeded by various challenges, one of the major ones being legacy software platforms. The opportunity cost to diverge from these platforms is often deemed too great. Siloed teams also hinder progress, as individual business units operate too autonomously, without tapping into enterprise systems and platforms to enhance marketing and customer touchpoints. This mentality is coupled with the belief that the war of customer conversion is won on the shelf, whereas in reality, digital plays a significant role in wallet-share, influencing buying decisions, and being the end-to-end journey for DTC CPG brands and products. 
A case for innovation  

75% of CPG shoppers…used digital channels in their most recent shopping journey to become inspired, browse research or select a brand. (Deloitte) 
A quarter of CPG shoppers that used brand websites or mobile apps to browse or research before or during their most recent journey also reported spending 108% more than shoppers who didn’t. (Deloitte) 

Brands with the strongest omni-channel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their CPG customers, in comparison to 33% of companies with weak strategies. (Harvard Business Review) 

One brand that has recently been recognized for its innovative use of digital is Colgate-Palmolive’s Hill’s pet food and nutrition brand. The brand’s key strategy is creating relevant emotional engagement with customers through personalized digital engagement: 

Their website balances specialized product (‘science-based pet nutrition’) content with tailored preferences and recommended products for ‘my pet’. 

Hill’s leverages analytics, along with 3rd- and 1st-party data to interact with customers during digital touchpoints. 

They lean heavily in e-comm – recently relaunched packaging with an e-comm first design. 

Their focus on elevating digital capabilities has helped accelerate growth with net sales for the Hill's Pet Nutrition business expanding by 14.5%, and organic sales growing to 18% (YOY, FY21-22).  (Consumer Goods Technology) 
Where Sitecore XM can help 
To aid in helping CPG enterprise companies help achieve results like Hill’s is adopting and incorporating a purpose-built digital experience platform like Sitecore XM.  

Sitecore XM Cloud is a flexible, enterprise-level software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based content management system (CMS). Its strength lies in giving marketers and content authors ease-of-use through its visual authoring capabilities, while providing back-end developers the flexibility of development (including headless architecture). Which means, if your CPG organization is a house-of-brands, each brand can leverage global templates and components for 80% of their features, functionality and page builds, while allowing for 20% of customization to offer that higher-touch aspect to reflect individual brand uniqueness and nuances.  

Key benefits of the platform include: 


    Data insights: With its embedded visitor analytics, XM Cloud can provide visibility into user engagement at a page-level, along with activating personalized page variants for different target audiences (e.g., users looking for dermatology resources versus those needing oncology information). Internal teams can get insights out of the system to make better data-driven decisions in support of improved patient satisfaction. 


    Speed-to-market: Being SaaS-based, XM Cloud doesn’t require heavily involved and time-consuming upgrades, as all platform updates are conducted automatically. Meaning it would not slow down internal teams from ensuring content and resources are always delivered to the right audiences. Additionally, with the built-in visual authoring capabilities, non-development resources can easily update content on the website.  
    Page performance: Because it’s SaaS-based, it can deliver high-performance (page speed) for web experiences. Helping to ensure information and resources patients are looking for are delivered within milliseconds (and avoiding costly calls directly to care administrators, when a task could have been done online). 
    Security: XM Cloud is always up-to-date, scales on-demand, and meets rigorous controls so organizations can power their global, content-driven digital experiences with confidence. 
    Scale: Sitecore Experience Manager Cloud’s SaaS and composable nature allows you to easily scale up and down your project based on business requirements. If your business grows, you can add modules, or remove tools you are not currently using. 

If you’re exploring avenues to modernize and ways to get to the next level of digital maturity – ultimately ‘being digital’ – we’d love to help.  
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Overcoming roadblocks to digital transformation in the CPG industry 

How a customer data platform meets patient needs and delivers business outcomes 
A customer data platform (like Salesforce Data Cloud) can be embedded to bring all the member and patient data and insights from each corner of the enterprise into one centralized accessible repository, aggregating it and, more importantly, unifying it into a golden record for each of their constituents. Now when a patient sets up an appointment with their care provider, the network can quickly identify who they are, what they have been seen for in the past, and tie back to any medical records and/or physician recommendations.  

From there, the provider can confirm if the care is already in-network through their employer’s insurance program (saving them on the cost of care). And if systems are connected in the right way, the patient’s prescription can be sent to the pharmacy via an automated system vs. having a care provider needing to “key or call it in” as the CDP can pass that information from EPIC directly to the preferred pharmacy.  

 

In this scenario, the CDP served as means to not only bring the patient’s data together, but also bridge the divide within the organization’s departments and business units created over time through the enterprise’s market growth strategy of acquisition. Now individual team members, regardless of the business unit (prescriptions, care, member services, etc.), have access to 360 member and patient data to minimize any points of friction as their constituents manage and pay for healthcare.  
 
At Horizontal, we believe that connected patient experiences stem from connected data. If you want to learn more about how we can help in your digital transformation, reach out! 
As members and patients traverse the vast network of offerings from finding care, receiving care and paying for care, the sheer size of the company has led to disconnected departments, functions and systems of the enterprise organization, making it very difficult to navigate which part of the system members should go to for what and when. To make matters worse, patient and member data lives in multiple places and isn’t easily accessible or shared across business units, with no single source of truth.  
A B2B2C integrated health payor and provider system offers its insurance members a wide swath of services, from preventive care to condition/disease treatments to prescriptions and medications. The company has grown dramatically through an aggressive acquisition strategy, bringing various health care networks into the fold along with adopting their capabilities, systems and patient/member data. 
Use Case: Unifying patient and member data by creating a single source of truth with a CDP 
Addressing individual health needs and delivering on business outcomes is particularly crucial in the highly regulated and often complicated journey within the Health and Life Sciences (HLS) sector. 

A patient’s experience with the healthcare system starts long before they even need care, and their journey continues long after clinical outcomes or interactions. Patient loyalty can erode if they find it difficult to engage with a provider at any point in the journey. Thus, ensuring when patients go from finding care to getting care to post-visit compliance to paying for care – it all has to be seamless and cohesive, across touchpoints, channels and devices. 

But we know it’s not easy. The COVID-19 crisis and the U.S. Health care system’s response to it have created seismic shifts in the health care industry. Challenges prevalent prior to the crisis have been accentuated, causing drastic changes in the care continuum and operational best practices.   

One solution to creating a seamless experience for patients is implementing a customer data platform (CDP).  The use case below illustrates how implementing a CDP drives both operational and organizational alignment in support of creating a personalized omni-channel connected experience – putting patients at the center of the care continuum.  
5 challenges healthcare organizations face with patient data
Drowning in data
Situation
Problem
Solution
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How a customer data platform meets patient needs and delivers business outcomes 

Learn how to leverage the power of patient data to deliver a seamless and connected healthcare experience with Salesforce Health Cloud and Sitecore XM Cloud
Harness the power of patient data with Sitecore and Salesforce
Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud is a flexible, enterprise-level software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based content management system (CMS). Its strength lies in giving marketers and content authors ease-of-use through its visual authoring capabilities, while providing back-end developers the flexibility of development (including headless architecture). 

For patient experience stakeholders it offers the following benefits:  

    Data insights: With its embedded visitor analytics, XM Cloud provides visibility into user engagement through embedded visitor analytics and personalizes page variants for different target audiences to improve patient satisfaction.  
    Speed-to-market: Because it is SaaS-based, XM Cloud offers quick implementation with automatic platform updates and easy content updating with built-in visual authoring.  
    Security: XM Cloud is always up-to-date, scales on-demand, and meets rigorous controls so organizations can power their global, content-driven digital experiences with confidence. 


    Scale: With its Cloud SaaS and composable nature, Sitecore XM allows you to easily scale up and down your project based on business requirements. If your business grows, you can add modules, or remove tools you are not currently using 

Connected data = connected experiences
Salesforce Health Cloud, Sitecore XM Cloud, paired with a CDP , and a sound customer patient and member journey strategy, can help organizations come to a full understanding of their patients and what drives them — while creating immersive 1:1 personalized connected experiences at scale.  

By implementing connectors and integrations between the two platforms, organizations can synchronize patient contact data. Through both APIs and custom integrations, your organization can realize seamless flow of patient and member data in support of providing holistic connected care.   

Is your organization rallied behind the importance of a connected patient journey? If so, you’re already winning half the battle. The other half is having the right systems in place, fully integrated within your technology stack and a partner to enable it. Horizontal can help guide you on the path of bringing connected experiences to life for your patients by using Salesforce and Sitecore. Our team is ready to help you realize your ambition of crafting healthcare experiences people love. 
Salesforce Health Cloud is a CRM system that manages doctor-patient interactions and records. With it, you can access a wide range of clinical and non-clinical data from multiple sources in one place, providing your organization with a complete picture of each patient. 

For patient experience stakeholders it offers the following benefits: 

    A 360-degree view: Providers have up-to-the-minute details of patients, including appointment history, current conditions, specialists attending to patients and medications, all centralized in one place without having to change screens or swap devices to access this information.  
    Scale & compliance: Health Cloud gives providers the ability to get patients their medicine more effectively through fulfillment tracking, patient sign-ups and shepherding prior authorizations. 
    Management of the patient journey: Health Cloud automates workflows and offers pre-built templates for omni-channel engagement, allowing providers to connect with patients throughout their journey from acquisition to retention.  
    
    Collaboration: Health Cloud allows care teams to assign ownership of health tasks or exchange secure and private messages between other health professionals, patients or members – and they can access those messages on any device.  

It’s no secret that in today’s world, great brand experiences lead to lasting and fulfilling patient and member relationships. This sensibility is why we believe in our Experience-Forward philosophy of putting people at the center of everything you do.   

Unfortunately, connected healthcare experiences tend to be the exception, not the norm.  Health and Life Sciences (HLS) organizations struggle to serve patients effectively due to competing priorities and challenges in managing patient data, making the process overwhelming for providers and patients. 

Despite these types of challenges, health networks’ digital experiences are still being held to greater standards, and organizations can no longer use the excuse of the pandemic when delivering less-than-desirable care management experiences. To stay competitive today, personalized patient journeys need to be a core tenet of organizational alignment: one that galvanizes teams and departments to lock arms with the common goal of realizing exceptional patient and member experiences.  
A healthy dose of patient data 

Marketers have the never-ending job of trying to keep up with patient and member expectations, let alone exceed them. One of those expectations is providing a cohesive patient experience that is seamlessly threaded across channels, devices and touchpoints as they traverse through the care continuum.  

To deliver on this, it is important to focus on leveraging the data behind every interaction. A data-first approach can avoid isolated and fragmented databases, leading to clear and consistent information for patients and avoiding confusion and frustration. By using real-time data, healthcare providers can quickly identify and address any health issues or concerns, leading to earlier interventions and improved outcomes.

When organizations have a single source of truth they can meet expectations by providing: 
An integrated tech stack is critical to bringing this patient and member experience to life by ensuring bi-directional flow of patient data. The right technology can enable and activate a better, holistic care journey, while following patient privacy and compliance requirements. 

Of course, simply adopting technologies alone won’t drive world-class experiences, but it is the foundation of a connected patient journey. Ultimately, it comes down to identifying and employing technology platforms that marry back-of-house operations with the experiences your constituents engage with daily.  

The good news is Salesforce and Sitecore have made the expensive and time-consuming trial-and-error period of finding the right mix of technology obsolete with their suite of integrated digital experience, support and service and marketing tools, all powered by patient data and analytics.

Bring connected patient experiences to life with Sitecore and Salesforce 
Salesforce Health Cloud
Sitecore XM Cloud
Our team is here to help.
Ready to start building a connected patient experience? 
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Harness the power of patient data with Sitecore and Salesforce

A seamless path to centralizing digital content operations 
Since Horizontal Digital started its Sitecore Content Hub learning path about two years ago, we have heard one question asked repeatedly from digital marketers living in cities like Dallas, Minneapolis, and Juneau. 
 
“What do I do after the DAM?”  

DAM refers to the digital asset management module that most clients get first when they buy Content Hub, which has an acronym-rich vocabulary that is confusing for even us “experts” to understand. So, we were relieved to hear at Sitecore Symposium that the software company is simplifying its licensing approach to make everything about Content Hub’s offerings easier to understand. 

It starts with a DAM 

Most people who work in the Sitecore ecosystem already know Sitecore DAM, the core module of the cloud-based Content Hub. It gives marketers a “central source of truth” for content marketing assets that include images, videos, documents, fonts, 3D files and more. The intent is to give creators, designers and developers a “one-stop shop” for all the files they need to do their jobs day in and day out. 

Once in Content Hub, the assets can be used in many different ways. You can create optimized images for a variety of use cases and connect the DAM to various other systems in a company’s digital marketing ecosystem. 

All companies need a digital asset management system and strategy, if you ask me. But once you get all your digital assets in one place, the real fun begins. 
After the DAM: What’s next? 

After you consolidate your marketing assets in one place through Sitecore DAM, your marketing world really opens, but that also means you need a way to navigate through it all. 

    But before you do anything, we recommend you ask yourself a few key questions: 
    How is marketing content prioritized & managed? 
    How are content elements reused across campaigns? 
    How would you categorize your content creation workflow? 
    Do you have a single source of truth for content engagement reporting? 
    How do you test content? 
    What content, marketing and technology team members are involved? 
    What KPIs will be used to measure success? 
    How do you measure and report on success? 

Once you have asked (and hopefully started to answer) those key questions, you should be armed with enough information to talk about extending your Content Hub licensing. Let’s start by talking about content operations, which is of interest to anyone who runs digital content/marketing teams. 
Meet Content Hub Operations 
Content Hub Operations combines the Content Hub modules content marketing platform (CMP) and marketing resource management (MRM) into one bundle. 
For those of you unfamiliar with these modules: 

    CMP allows organizations to use Content Hub as a place to centralize their content operations. That includes social media and content publishing, strategy, calendaring and more. 


    MRM allows resource management and project management from Content Hub, which enables project managers and resource teams to do their work from Content Hub. 

The goal is a software ecosystem that facilitates omni-channel management and personalization strategy in an “atomic content age” for teams wanting to fully embrace centralized digital content operations. Atomic content is content that is structured for digital distribution in a headless delivery world. What is the formula for atomic content? 

							  Ct ÷ Md + Bl + Re = Infinite Content Possibilities 

In other words, content types (Ct) that are broken down into metadata fields (Md) and infused with business logic (Bl) and relationships (Re) give marketers and developers the foundational elements to build great digital experiences whether you are creating a website, kiosk, streaming TV service or whitepaper in a headless delivery framework. 

With Sitecore Connect, Content Hub already ties nicely to Sitecore XM and XP, where editors can retrieve assets from Content Hub in an integrated editing environment. 

When you layer on top Sitecore Content Operations, you add the ability to create structured content types with associated metadata and relationships so that digital marketers can consolidate their workflows in one place and developers can use that creative output to power digital experiences. 

As importantly, companies can ensure only brand-approved assets are used in digital marketing efforts, which is one of the business benefits of centralized content operations. Remember when KFC changed its logo from “Finger Lickin’ Good” at the beginning of the pandemic out of fear the fried chicken lovers would spread COVID? Can you imagine doing that sort of enterprise slogan change without some sort of centralized digital distribution system to control it all? 

Experience Edge for scalability in headless
“Experience Edge makes Content Hub data available in the cloud using distributed data delivery platform with a GraphQL endpoint,” explained Sarvesh Jain, a Sitecore developer and technology lead at Horizontal Digital. In other words, Content Hub makes it possible for developers to take the API-driven output from Content Hub and use it in digital delivery.  

Benefits include: 

    Scalability - Publish content to a highly scalable content delivery network (CDN) 
    Reaches customers across all channels - Publish Sitecore content to any device or channel (watches, phones, tablets, voice-controlled devices and so on) 
    Integrates with any platform - All applications can make application programming interface (API) calls and consume content from GraphQL endpoint 

Creative automation solution 

Creative automation is the process of tying graphic assets and digital data together to create smart templates, which allow companies to produce graphic assets like PDFs at scale. In Content Hub, smart templates are driven by CHILI Publish, one of the nation’s top creative automation providers. 

The end goal is to empower companies by: 

    Allowing designers to stay creative 
    Allowing non-designers to produce professional graphic assets at scale without design assistance 

Under Content Hub’s Print license, CHILI Publish is available in an inline editing experience that allows brand-approved assets from within Content Hub to be exposed within Smart Templates. When you combine those assets with data from Content Hub, the presentation options power outputs that include websites, PDFs and more. The two integrated software systems together power Smart Print Templates that editors can use to create localized publications for regions and languages. 

There is set up involved, so you will want to work with an implementation partner like Horizontal Digital on your initial proof of concept to make sure your teams can learn from the ground up in the right way. 

What about Content Hub One? 

If you work in the Sitecore ecosystem, you have probably heard about Content Hub One, a new product built on top of the Content Hub platform. It is a headless and lightweight content management system (CMS) with some content lifecycle management abilities with a lightweight DAM included. 

Developers can leverage a rich set of software development kits (SDKs) and APIs supporting popular front-end frameworks, enabling enterprises to build cool things quickly, which is the point of all this digital stuff anyway. 

It lacks the other modules that Content Hub includes but can be considered by companies that want a lightweight and straightforward headless publishing solution with trained teams willing to take a leap into headless with a supporting strategy to get there. 

I use the word “strategy” with intention. Building modern digital experiences at the enterprise level requires coordination, creative aptitude, and the ability to technically execute with long-term enterprise-level support. So, if you ask your digital teams what "headless” means and they come back with responses like “horseman?” you should talk to a partner about the road ahead. 

Without the right strategy at the get-go, we promise it will be a bumpy ride.  
Next steps after a Sitecore DAM implementation 
We want to help. 
Are you ready to take a step toward digital maturity?
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A seamless path to centralizing digital content operations 

Mapping your Sitecore destiny
Anyone who has struggled with the option of fries vs. onion rings (or shawarma vs. shish tawook) knows that choices can be wonderful and difficult at the same time. And here you are, a digital leader, perhaps having come away from Sitecore’s recent Symposium with a host of ideas for using their newest suite of composable products. But wait – they’ve formally released version 10.3 of their flagship DXP, Sitecore XP. Now what? 
The correct response to the first question is – objectively and indisputably – onion rings and shawarma. Your answer to the second question will depend on a variety of factors, but we’re here to help make the matter easier by sharing a few key decision criteria. For any company currently using Sitecore XP, the question of migrating to a more modern technology paradigm is not “if,” but “when.” And for many, the current fork in the road points in one direction toward XP v10.3, and toward XM Cloud in the other. 
Before we tell you which path to choose, here’s a quick scene-setter to orient you on how you got to this fork in the first place. It’s a -- dare I use the ancient buzzword -- “paradigm shift.” (No, it really is.) 
For the last decade-plus, Sitecore and other digital experience technology leaders have provided all-in-one digital experience platforms (DXPs) that unify content management with analytics, testing, personalization, automation and other digital marketing capabilities. They built these “monolithic” solutions because it was expensive and time consuming for technologists to try to make a bunch of separate systems talk to one another: integration of systems and technology capabilities was “The Problem” that roadblocked your ability to advance your digital experiences. To avoid that problem, Sitecore and the other martech leaders gave you one system that could do it all. 
Fast forward to today, and the technology paradigm has shifted: Advances in application programming interfaces (APIs), microservices and headless delivery have greatly reduced the time, effort and cost required to make separate technologies exchange data or otherwise interact with one another. So that integration problem from back in the day is no longer The Problem. You can now mix-and-match best-in-class capabilities via any variety of SaaS-based solutions to build a martech stack highly specific to your use cases and your spot on the digital maturity curve. Sitecore and other long-term leaders in the space have focused their forward-looking product strategy on this new mix-and-match, or “composable” paradigm. And now we’re at that fork: do you stick with the monolithic XP solution you already have, or do you head in the composable direction?
“Composable is the future.” 
Sitecore plastered that sentence on every available surface at their October Symposium. I would argue that composable is actually “now,” and that’s the first consideration in your decision about how best to invest in Sitecore’s DXP technology. Sitecore has been abundantly clear that their product strategy focuses on their newer, composable options. So, your investment decision is less of an “if” question and more of a “when.” 

Here, in early 2023, there are as many good reasons to stay on the XP road – and to upgrade to v10.3 – as there are to migrate to something composable. (Helpful hint: that XP road is going to lead you back to composable at some point – whether in six months or three years.) Here are the questions and criteria you need to consider to make a decision that’s informed by your specific circumstances, that is ROI-driven, and that sets you up for what’s next in your digital evolution. 
What version of Sitecore XP do you use today?

    XP v9.3 or older: You’re behind on important digital experience capabilities; you may be violating internal compliance standards and external regulations – particularly important in highly regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare; and you will face limited options if something were to go wrong.  


    XP v10.0 or newer: You’re not missing out on hypercritical features, and your software is still supported by Sitecore. Read on for more on how to narrow down your options for staying at or ahead of the digital experience curve. 

For you laggards… 
If you’re on v9.3 or older, it’s time to take a good hard look in the mirror and question the value your organization places on digital experience. You probably already recognize that you’re missing out on a lot of features that would make your digital experience management faster, easier and more effective. While you’re pausing to admire that problem, let me also note that XP versions 9.2 and 9.3 just went out of mainstream support. If you’re running version 9.3 or older, you’re putting your capabilities at risk in terms of getting help (if and when) something breaks. Running unsupported software also creates serious angst in most enterprise compliance departments, so if you need help getting your internal stakeholders and budget approvers to invest in best-in-class digital, your compliance team might provide just the motivation your leadership needs to get off the dime. 
Digital leaders stay current on technology so they can continuously evolve and enhance their capabilities in service to ever-improving experiences and outcomes. That said: struggling to keep up with software upgrades provides all the more reason to skip an upgrade to v10.3, migrating instead to XM Cloud and Sitecore’s other SaaS offerings. With SaaS, expensive and time-consuming upgrades are a thing of the past; the latest and greatest features just kind of appear (mostly) automagically. 
The aforementioned fork in the road is your golden opportunity to take a big leap toward being the digital leader you always wanted to be. Sitecore XP, while still powerfully innovative, is not the future. With a few exceptions noted below, companies currently running Sitecore XP v9.3 or older should be planning a migration to Sitecore’s composable suite as their next move. And soon! 
If you meet the above criteria, there are two (ok, two and a half) factors that could cause you to plan a different migration path:

    Sitecore XM Cloud is not (yet) SOC 2 compliant. SOC 2 is a voluntary set of standards related to the collection and storage of data: what’s collected, how it’s stored, secured and used, etc. Sitecore is in the process of obtaining that certification and it would surprise me if they don’t have it in hand within the next year at most. But if it’s a prerequisite for your IT, infosec and/or compliance team(s) you’ll want to hold off until Sitecore hits that mark. Until then, you can stick with XP, or consider Sitecore’s XM with Managed Cloud as a potential interim step to the fully SaaS XM Cloud. 
    Migration might not be a small undertaking. This is a short-term issue, but an issue for some nonetheless. Getting from Sitecore XP to a newer solution is not a switch-flip.


    The older your current version of Sitecore, the more complex your migration is likely to be. (You should have kept up when you had the  chance!) 
    If you’re already making substantial use of XP’s analytics, personalization and testing capabilities, you’ll need a plan to complete your migration without having to start over from scratch with those tactics. We know that the majority of Sitecore XP clients make relatively limited use of those features, which should streamline their migration path. 


3. Consider how a migration fits into your broader digital roadmap. You should always look at the bigger picture when planning a digital project of any scale. On one end, you could look at the project as a one-for-one technology migration, focused exclusively on swapping out the old in favor of the new with no major changes. On the other, you could consider options to combine the technology migration with a revisit of your end-user-facing digital experiences, and/or with significant new feature builds or integrations with other systems like CRM or a commerce solution.  
If, for any of the above reasons, you determine you’re not quite ready to move to a full SaaS solution, you do have the options of XP v10.3, or XM/Managed Cloud as interim steps. But “interim” is the operative word: a full composable, SaaS-forward solution is where you’re going to want to end up. 
But why XP v10.3? 
The list of what’s new in XP v10.3 might not inspire business decision-makers with groundbreaking new features; the updates are written to appeal mostly to technologists. So what’s the business value in an upgrade? You might be surprised: 


    Setting yourself up for what’s next: I mentioned above that moving your user data from old to new is a not-trivial undertaking. But it will be a lot easier with the new xConnect Data Export Tool, which will be the first step in ensuring a smooth migration from xDB (old) to Personalize, CDP and/or other systems which need that data to continue and enhance your delivery of personalized experiences and journeys. The points to the value of 10.3 as a solid interim step on your path to composable.
    
    SEO: The 10.3 feature list includes several additions that will help beef up your SEO performance: configuring sitemaps and robots.txt for headless implementations, and optimizing a bunch of JavaScript-related stuff that will make sites perform faster – an increasingly critical component of SEO success as well as end-user satisfaction. 
    
    SXA for headless: If you were blocked from going headless due to your use of Sitecore Experience Accelerator, dry your tears! SXA can work in a headless paradigm now, which is good for current SXA users both in terms of “now” and “next”: This change would help simplify the path for an SXA user to a future in XM Cloud. 

TLDR: Most Sitecore XP clients who are running on XP 9.3 or older should already be making a plan to move straight to a composable solution. Horizontal can help you figure out how to fit that move into your broader digital roadmap. Those already running an earlier version of v10 have time to consider their options, one of which is to realize the material benefits of v10.3 as an interim path to your composable future. Again, let Horizontal’s experts guide you on that path! 
 
 
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Mapping your Sitecore destiny

Content Hub One: An agile Headless CMS 
Is Content Hub One available and ready to use today? 

Although this product is not yet ready, as it will take next few months on the GA (General Availability), we got a sneak peek of the product in Sitecore MVP summit during the Symposium event. The solution is an entry point to Sitecore content portfolio that allows customers to upgrade when they’re ready to the full capabilities of Content Hub.  


Is Content Hub One ready to compete with other Headless CMS vendor in the market? 

Not yet, but they are not far behind. Sitecore is not new to CMS and they have two-decade history of building products, which is why we can say that Future versions have the potential to eclipse competitors. Sitecore is positioning Content Hub One as a true Headless CMS against competitor in the Headless CMS world like ContentStack and Contentful.  
 

Who is potential customer of Sitecore Content Hub One? 
I think Content Hub One may not be a direct match for current Sitecore customers, but it could be best fit for those customers who are looking for rapid microsites or spin up a temporary campaign site or the content engine behind a mobile app. Moreover, it is best match for those marketers who are looking for pure headless CMS having data driven use cases where content is populated by APIs rather than curated by content authors. It’s also a good fit for those customers who typically have in-house front-end developers that work with the marketing team. 
 

How’s Sitecore Content Hub future looking ahead? 

I believe that Sitecore Content Hub One is going to rapidly grow and mature in headless CMS space. The probability of it becoming one of the core products of Sitecore suit in near future, specifically considering Sitecore’s decades of experience building content management services. Sitecore will continue to add features over time but leaning into their other offerings of Sitecore Content Hub. Until that time, we need to patiently wait and watch for further updates from Sitecore. 

If you’d like to know more about Sitecore Content Hub One or any of new additions to the Sitecore family, feel free to get in touch with us. We can help you to know they might help you to craft your composable DXP. 
Sitecore Content Hub 
Content Hub is more suitable for DAM and other content operations 

On the other hand, Content Hub is a complete solution to offer omnichannel experience to brands by providing end to end content life cycle. 


Content Hub provide enterprise capabilities such as: 

    Digital Asset Management (DAM)  
    Content Marketing  
    Marketing Resource Management  
    Content Planning and Strategy  
    Digital Rights Management  

Sitecore Content Hub One 
Sitecore is positioning Content Hub One as Pure Headless CMS 
Content Hub One is an agile Headless CMS platform that enables brand to rapidly launch and manage experience on various digital channels without worrying about underlying technologies. 

Content Hub One provide enterprise capabilities such as: 

    Content Modelling 
    Content Authoring 
    Modern Frontend APIs 

Here are some features of Sitecore Content Hub One: 

    One platform for content modeling, authoring and consumption 
    Pure Headless CMS 
    Cloud native SaaS enabled composable platform 
    Content Modelling 
    Easy Content Authoring 
    Language and framework agnostic 
    Modern APIs 
    Can be used to serve products, campaigns and small markets 

How does Sitecore Content Hub differ from Sitecore Content Hub and CMS? 

While the product has its origin in Content Hub platform, gained through the 2018 acquisition of Stylelabs, it is a completely different product with its own distinct features.  
Realizing the varying need of brands, Sitecore has adapted its robust Content Hub offering for brands looking for entry points into digital experience delivery versus a holistic marketing strategy. The result is Content Hub One
Sitecore 
Each year, the Sitecore Symposium event is known for exciting announcements and updates we can look forward to in the coming year. In continuation to this tradition, Sitecore announced three new product offerings at our event on October 18, 2022.  
These included: 
1. Sitecore Content Hub One 
2. Sitecore Search 
3. Sitecore Connect 
Now we know what you must be thinking- what is Content Hub One, and how does it differ from the existing Content Hub product? We’ll cover all the details in this article for our readers and specifically discuss the benefits of the new Content Hub One product. 

What is Sitecore Content Hub One? 
Sitecore Content Hub One is focused, lightweight, agile headless CMS that allows brands to launch and manage experiences on various digital channels including web, mobile, KIOSK, social media and other IOT channels. It is cloud native and pure headless CMS that allows marketers to quickly create, manage and deliver content that fits to any channel without worrying much about deployments. Moreover, it gives developers the freedom to build frontends using any framework for data-driven content experiences, while allowing marketers to work in parallel to author content. 
 
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Content Hub One: An agile Headless CMS 

Sitecore Symposium 2022: The content experience  
Dave O'Flanagan
Chief Product Officer, Sitecore
The content experience is the customer experience. Tools to listen, understand, analyze and personalize. If the content is not delivered consistently in a way that resonates with the customer – it just won’t land.
So now we understand why Sitecore has doubled down this space, but what do the products do? Here’s a peek into how Sitecore rounded out its content cloud gap. 

XM Cloud  

Although XM Cloud was announced prior to Symposium, it’s important to understand the role that it plays in the Sitecore content cloud. For many going into Symposium, a common misconception was that XM Cloud was the successor to XM, but what Dave brought to light was that XM Cloud is XP’s successor. XM Cloud has been thought of as an enterprise CMS that addressed the content management needs at an enterprise level, but it’s more than that. According to Dave, “For 80% of Sitecore’s customer’s, [they] believe that XM Cloud will provide all the capabilities that they need and more.”  

How, you wonder? Aside from offering content management capabilities, XM Cloud offers personalization, insights, and an easy-to-use page builder in a centralized location called Sitecore Pages. With their ultra-scalable solution, integration is as easy as a tag or a beacon on your sites, allowing marketers to ship sites without the intervention of IT. To top it all off, “customers that need more sophistication can upgrade from XM Cloud to CDP for data management with the click of a button” (Sitecore).  

Content Hub One  

The first of three new product announcements was Content Hub One—the small sibling of XM Cloud. Sitecore XM is known to be a SaaS-based CMS geared towards larger enterprises and complex implementations. But now, with Content Hub One, there’s a headless CMS that is lightweight, agile and does not require an enterprise-wide implementation. Content Hub One addresses a key gap in the market of brands needing a simpler solution to content management. Now, there’s a solution for simple use cases: a short-term campaign or landing page site can be built and live in weeks. 

What’s also great about Content Hub One is that it is built on Content Hub, a proven product with enterprise scale and performance. “You can integrate with XM Cloud, share the same database as an enterprise DAM or MRM with the click of a button, with no additional integrations required. And to top it off, marketers, enterprise and digital teams can work in parallel,” explained Dave.   

Content Search  

Content Search — the second product announcement — is a standalone SaaS search engine. Leveraging the Reflektion’s engine, an acquisition made 14 months ago, Content Search offers an advanced search solution that is intuitive, intelligent and AI powered. “It provides fast predictive search, relevant content as you type, and anticipated intent in milliseconds,” said Dave.  

Content Search can not only be integrated with XM Cloud or Content Hub One but also index content from any CMS. This product is made for technologists and marketers alike, offering relevant and flexible search capabilities. With its intuitive back-office UI, a marketer can easily manage the search experience with limited technical expertise. It also has detailed search and content analytics that makes it easy for marketers to understand search performance. You can now see it in action by visiting Sitecore.com. 

Connect 

Connect is the third product release. “With Connect, Sitecore really wanted to be the gateway for any organization’s composable journey,” said VP of Technology, Horizontal, Sheetal Jain. This product works to integrate data across the enterprise using a plug-and-play tool that allows you to easily connect with any out-of-the-box connectors. Its low code, no code environment allows transfer of data from your digital asset management to almost any other data system. What’s also great is that it can work with any Sitecore app, legacy Sitecore product or any third-party vendor imaginable.  

Connect’s ability to bring flexibility and solve the complexities and length that come with composable integrations is a game changer. Integration in a composable world holds real importance, and this product seamlessly allows data to travel from one system to another in a timely manner. Getting real-time insights in a faster time is what technologists have been looking for because it means faster time to market.  

Content has always been at the epicenter of Sitecore’s product roadmap, but they are focusing their attention on it more than any vendor in the market. Their goal is to be the content platform of the internet and since the content experience is the customer experience, we cannot wait to help our clients unlock the full potential of these products. To learn more about how we can help you harness the power of Sitecore to create connected experiences, contact us.   
Watch our Symposium highlights to learn more about Sitecore’s new product launches  
Sitecore Symposium 2022 was all about Meeting Every Moment and this year’s in-person event was filled with memorable moments with partners, peers and colleagues. However, the most notable highlight was the announcement from Sitecore CEO Steve Tzikakis on their three new product launches – Content Hub One, Content Search and Connect.  

The driving force behind these new products is Sitecore’s mission “to maintain leadership in content and disrupt the engagement and commerce markets. The goal is to help [customers] succeed and convert customers into fans,” said Steve. At Horizontal, we share this sentiment and deliver on it through our connected experience expertise to help clients build momentum with their customers to create long-term relationships. And as a part of this process, we understand the important role that content plays in delivering a truly connected customer experience.  
 
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Sitecore Symposium 2022: The content experience  

Creating a connected patient experience with Salesforce
Within the Health and Life Sciences (HLS) sector, organizations face a plethora of issues, competing priorities and operational pitfalls that slow them down and prevent them from better serving their patients and members. From the perspective of a health care consumer, the journey of finding, receiving and paying for care is still a very complex (and often confusing) process.

More and more consumers of health services (both treatment and care), along with customers of health insurance benefits, are demanding a tailored and simplified experience as a part of their health care journey. 

Here at Horizontal, we call these tailored expectations "connected experiences.” And as an Experience-Forward consultancy, we know that connected patient experiences are what allows HLS brands to build greater possibilities and achieve stronger relationships.

Realizing connected experiences, however, relies on an exceptionally designed, end-to-end patient experience. This experience is activated via a patient data-enabled, integrated tech stack that seamlessly captures patient data, and then funnels it to key systems for continued patient engagement across sales, service and support, and marketing automation. 

A patient’s experience with the health care system starts long before they even need care, and their journey continues long after clinical outcomes or interactions. World-class patient experience programs understand the role of a health care provider before, during, and after care and respond to patients’ needs at every stage along that journey. (Qualtrics)

Patient loyalty can erode if they find it difficult to engage with a provider at any point in the journey. That’s why it’s critical for the patient journey to be seamless and cohesive – across touchpoints, channels and devices – at every step, starting from the moment they search for care to when they get care, to post-visit compliance through to paying for care, and every interaction thereafter.

Salesforce is leading the way in end-to-end connected experience technology

Simply adopting technologies alone won’t drive world-class relationships with your patients/members. But it is the foundation to delivering the friction-free, contextual and anticipatory moments upon which these relationships are based. It comes down to identifying and employing critical technology platforms that marry back-of-house operations with the experiences your customers engage with daily.

At Horizontal, we help health care organizations realize this future vision by delivering on the promise of building connected patient and member experiences. One of the most critical ingredients in the customer experience mix is identifying and using the right tools. We believe that Salesforce’s technology offerings give businesses every edge they need to seize a leadership position in providing exceptional customer engagements.

Salesforce technology suite of offerings can drive superior experiences by:

    Seamlessly fusing purpose-built health care system customer relationship managements (CRMs), like Salesforce Health Cloud, which securely and safely capture HIPAA and PII data for better service and support
    Leveraging marketing automation for relevant messaging — from patient education and compliance to maximizing in-network benefits to driving lower cost of care
    Implementing a digital experience platform (DXP) to create exceptional digital experiences, while activating patient and member data
    Harnessing holistic patient and member data in a centralized repository like Salesforce CDP with Salesforce Genie for organization’s functions, departments and teams to support the continuum of care


    Utilizing the power of a real-time interaction management (RTIM) solution to aid in orchestrating personalization across channels

Want to learn more about how we help create an omni-channel patient experience with Salesforce technology? Let’s chat.
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