Experience Transformation in Healthcare Starts Beneath the Surface

In healthcare, better digital experiences are often discussed as a front-end challenge: simpler navigation, cleaner interfaces, fewer clicks and more convenient access to care. Those things matter. But for health systems, payers and healthcare services organizations, experience transformation rarely succeeds when it stops at the screen.

Patient access, member engagement, digital pharmacy, virtual care and service coordination all depend on the quality of the systems underneath them. When core platforms are monolithic, data is fragmented and critical workflows are trapped in outdated architectures, even the best-designed experience will struggle to perform. New services launch slowly. Call center volumes stay high. Teams cannot scale innovation across regions, channels or business units. And every enhancement becomes more expensive than it should be.

That is why healthcare leaders need to think about experience transformation and modernization as one agenda, not two. At Publicis Sapient, we bring together experience strategy, product thinking, engineering, cloud-native architecture, API-centric design and AI-enabled modernization to help healthcare organizations improve access and accelerate digital care with infrastructure that can support continuous change.

Better experiences require better foundations

Healthcare organizations are under constant pressure to make services easier to access, easier to understand and faster to deliver. Patients expect digital interactions that feel intuitive and connected. Members want timely, reliable service. Clinical and operational teams need systems that do not slow them down.

Yet many organizations are still trying to deliver modern experiences on top of legacy estates that were never built for today’s demands. In one healthcare modernization engagement, a U.S. healthcare organization had spent years attempting to convert a large portfolio of business applications built on COBOL. Fewer than 10 percent of those applications had been modernized through traditional methods. More than 10,000 COBOL green screens remained in place, running on costly mainframes and making change difficult, slow and unpredictable.

By using Sapient Slingshot to help cloud-native developers modernize legacy code into a microservices-based architecture, Publicis Sapient helped the organization move three times faster and reduce modernization costs by more than 50 percent. Just as importantly, the result was not only a technical migration. The new environment became easier to maintain, more scalable and better suited to support essential digital services.

That is the point healthcare leaders cannot afford to miss: legacy modernization is not separate from patient or member experience. It is often the prerequisite for it.

Modernization unlocks access to digital care

The same principle holds true at the care-platform level. Publicis Sapient’s work with St. Luke’s Health System shows how experience transformation becomes more powerful when it is paired with modernization below the surface. By modernizing a decade-old digital care platform and reauthoring 4,500 pages, St. Luke’s made virtual and in-person services easier to access, coordinate and scale across its regional network. Slingshot helped modernize legacy systems and accelerate delivery, creating a stronger platform for ongoing experience evolution rather than a one-time redesign.

This kind of work matters because healthcare access is rarely a single journey. It spans search, scheduling, content, service routing, care coordination and follow-up. If the underlying architecture cannot support reliable updates, cross-channel consistency and system-wide performance, access will continue to feel fragmented no matter how polished the interface looks.

Publicis Sapient’s approach to experience transformation recognizes that speed, reliability and task completion improve when the underlying technology changes. New journeys can be launched incrementally, without destabilizing what already exists, and experiences can remain consistent as demand grows across markets, facilities and service lines.

Digital pharmacy shows what connected infrastructure can do

A digital pharmacy experience makes the connection between infrastructure and outcomes especially clear. In one engagement, a U.S. healthcare services provider needed to address outdated, monolithic architecture that was slowing even basic business enhancements and making it harder for patients to find and receive medication.

Publicis Sapient partnered with the provider to improve the experience at two levels at once. First, teams rapidly launched a new end-to-end digital pharmacy experience informed by clear user experience best practices. Second, they built an enterprise-wide, API-centric digital strategy and modular cloud-native blueprint to support not just the pharmacy service, but future strategic services as well. Reusable enterprise capabilities including workflow, profiles and personalization created the basis for faster launches across teams and architectures.

The impact reached both the patient experience and the operating model behind it. The provider saw improved user satisfaction, increased adoption of digital pharmacy services and home delivery, higher NPS, less dependence on the call center and lower abandonment along the journey. At the same time, the organization gained a more flexible foundation for bringing new solutions to market quickly and integrating them across business units and partner offerings.

This is a powerful lesson for healthcare organizations: when experience design and platform modernization move together, digital services do more than look better. They become easier to scale, easier to extend and easier to trust.

A healthcare transformation model built for regulated complexity

Healthcare is a regulated, high-stakes environment. That makes superficial transformation especially risky. Modern experiences must be reliable, auditable, scalable and able to evolve without breaking continuity. Publicis Sapient helps healthcare organizations meet that challenge by combining capabilities across Strategy, Product, Experience, Engineering and Data & AI.

Publicis Sapient’s broader experience transformation model is built on the idea that trust is earned through performance. It is not enough to create attractive digital touchpoints. Organizations need systems that can coordinate decisions across channels, integrate with existing platforms and partners, and govern change as services expand.

From redesign to reinvention

Healthcare leaders do not need more disconnected digital projects. They need a transformation model that links infrastructure renewal to the experiences patients, members and employees actually feel.

That is why the most durable healthcare experience improvements do not begin with a homepage refresh or a new mobile feature. They begin by modernizing the systems, codebases, architectures and delivery models that shape every touchpoint. When that foundation changes, access becomes simpler, launches become faster and innovation becomes scalable.

Publicis Sapient helps healthcare organizations make that shift—from fragmented legacy estates to modern digital platforms, and from isolated UX improvements to true experience transformation. By connecting modernization with strategy, design and engineering, we help health enterprises build services that are easier to access, faster to deliver and ready to grow with the people who depend on them.