Overview
Hospitals run on communication. When staff can’t quickly find a colleague’s contact, access a policy document, or submit a leave request without chasing down paperwork, it creates friction that pulls people away from patient care. We built a modern, centralized intranet for Wooster Community Hospital on Drupal that brings everything staff need into one place. From a searchable phone directory to a document center and leave management, the platform is designed around how hospital teams actually work.
About the Client
Wooster Community Hospital is a full-service community hospital serving patients and families across the Wooster, Ohio region. With a diverse workforce spanning clinical, administrative, and support departments, the hospital operates around the clock across multiple units. Like many community hospitals, their internal communication and document management had grown across disconnected systems over the years, making it harder for staff to find what they needed quickly.
Goals
The hospital wanted a single internal platform where staff could access everything they needed for day-to-day operations. The key priorities were making staff contact information easy to find, giving employees a reliable place to locate and download official documents, streamlining how leave requests are submitted and tracked, and providing a central hub for hospital news and announcements. The intranet also needed to be straightforward enough that staff with varying levels of technical comfort could use it without training.
Challenges
A hospital environment brings specific complexity to an intranet build. Staff access the system across different devices and settings, whether at a nursing station, in an administrative office, or briefly from a shared terminal. Role-based access was a key requirement since not all content is appropriate for all staff, and certain HR functions needed to be visible only to the right people.
The document center posed its own challenge. Hospitals maintain a large volume of policies, forms, and reference materials that are regularly revised. The solution needed to support versioning and organized categorization so staff could always trust they were accessing the most current version of a document rather than a cached or outdated copy.
Leave management added another layer of coordination. The process needed to connect employees, their managers, and HR in a structured workflow without requiring a separate HR system login for basic submissions and approvals.
Solutions
We built the intranet on Drupal, taking advantage of its robust content management capabilities and flexible access control. The platform was structured around the core needs of hospital staff and organized into clear sections that are easy to navigate from any device.
The staff directory and phone book gives every employee a searchable, filterable view of colleagues across departments. Staff can look up a name, department, or role and get direct contact details without calling the front desk or digging through a shared spreadsheet. Profiles include phone extensions, email addresses, department affiliations, and job titles, and are managed centrally so updates stay current.
The document center is built around categorized content types with version control. Policy documents, HR forms, clinical reference materials, and administrative templates are organized by department and document type. When a document is updated, the previous version is archived and the new version is surfaced automatically. Staff always land on the current document without any guesswork.
Leave applications are handled through a structured form workflow built into the intranet. Employees submit requests directly through the platform, which routes them to the appropriate manager for review. HR has visibility into the full pipeline, and staff receive status updates without needing to follow up manually. The process replaces what was previously done through email chains or physical forms.
Beyond these core features, the intranet includes a news and announcements section for hospital-wide communications, an events calendar for staff activities and training schedules, quick links for frequently accessed external tools and systems, a department pages section where individual units can maintain their own content, and an IT helpdesk request form for internal support tickets.
Role-based access control ensures that sensitive content, such as HR documents and management-level communications, is only visible to the staff members it is intended for. Authentication is tied to hospital credentials so there is no separate login to manage.
Results
Staff across departments now have one place to go for internal needs that previously required multiple systems or manual processes. The phone directory alone has reduced the time staff spend tracking down contact information across busy shifts. The document center has given HR and compliance teams confidence that employees are always referencing current, approved versions of policies and forms. Leave request processing has become faster and more transparent for employees, managers, and HR alike. The intranet has become a reliable daily touchpoint for hospital communications, and the Drupal foundation gives the hospital’s internal team the flexibility to expand and maintain content without needing developer support for routine updates.