Healthcare / Independent Hospital System

Founded in 1866

Headquartered in Chesterfield, Missouri

1,443,545 inpatient and outpatient encounters, surgeries, and emergency care visits

5,224 medical staff and employees

Today’s healthcare consumers are digitally savvy. They research providers and make decisions online, preferring organizations that make these tasks easy. For many, that journey starts with a single website visit—one that shapes trust and determines whether a patient moves forward or looks elsewhere. The website, often a patient’s first interaction with a health system, is now a primary channel for growth.

St. Luke’s is an independent health system serving the St. Louis area, known for its patient-first approach. The team has long understood that the path to a patient begins well before they walk through the door.

Today, that path begins with a search bar: the front door to care.

The standard is set by all other digital experiences patients have. They expect to find the right specialist quickly, locate an urgent care nearby and open now, or book with a doctor who accepts their insurance and new patients. Search performance is increasingly the difference between a new patient and a missed one.

St. Luke’s knew this. But like many health systems working with legacy platforms, their website fell short. Transforming it into a true digital front door became the challenge they set out to solve.

Health systems across the region had modernized their digital experiences: branded, cohesive, and built around how patients actually search for care. St. Luke’s had studied what others were doing well and knew there were gaps to fill.

Those gaps ran deeper than design. The website ran on an aging IBM platform, and search was powered by the out-of-date Google Search Appliance. The digital experience needed a full rebuild.

The legacy system left the team without the tools a modern Find Care experience requires. Search results were often stale or out of context. Patients searching for specific care might not surface the right providers at all. The provider directory was locked in a third-party platform with almost no flexibility: limited control over how results appeared, how they were ranked, or how they could be used in marketing.

There were no location pages. A patient could find a name and address, but no map, no hours, no context—little to help them take the next step. And online scheduling, while technically available, was easy to miss. The experience lacked any indication that patients could book immediately with an available provider. Each part of the experience operated in isolation, leaving patients to piece together the path to care on their own.

For Garlich and his lean marketing team, the conclusion was clear: the site needed a ground-up rebuild, with search at the center. The project had clear visibility and support even from the executive level.

St. Luke’s had done their homework. By studying regional and national systems raising the bar, they identified a clear pattern: the best digital experiences felt like a seamless extension of the brand. No detours into disconnected systems. No jarring visual shifts. Just a coherent, intuitive journey from search to care.

That insight shaped the redesign. As the team rebuilt their site on Adobe Experience Manager, they anchored the project around five goals:

• Strengthening the brand
• Improving patient access
• Streamlining the experience
• Unifying data
• Aligning technology with patient needs and organizational security

At the center was a clear design philosophy: make the site search-forward. That meant more than placing a search bar on the homepage. It meant a search experience that adapts in real time: responding to visitor behavior, learning from usage patterns, and surfacing results shaped by both data and deliberate business rules.

A dedicated Find-a-Doctor experience, built for patients in active discovery mode, allowed patients to find and book care in a single journey, with results that were not just relevant, but immediately actionable.

Choosing a search platform meant navigating tradeoffs St. Luke’s couldn’t afford to get wrong.

During the evaluation, the team assessed options across their new CMS and third-party tools. For a small team already managing a full website rebuild, the last thing they needed was another system requiring constant manual effort, like relevance tuning by hand, ongoing rules management, and continuous upkeep just to keep results accurate.

Coveo stood apart. It offered a more turnkey approach: ready to integrate from day one and designed to improve without constant intervention. Machine learning models handle relevance tuning automatically, adapting to how patients actually search over time. The team could focus on outcomes, not infrastructure.

Just as important, Coveo enabled the kind of seamless, brand-aligned experience St. Luke’s had seen in the market:

“When we looked at other health systems, their search experience felt fully integrated with the rest of the site,” said Garlich. “Ours didn’t. You could tell patients were jumping to something separate. With Coveo, we were able to bring that experience back in line with our brand and make it feel seamless.”

Coveo also gave the team something entirely new: control over search as a marketing tool. Instead of a static directory, search became a dynamic acquisition channel—one that could guide patients to the right providers faster, support campaigns with precision, and directly influence access and growth. The provider directory was no longer a locked box.

The new St. Luke’s website launched in February 2025. At its heart was a Coveo-powered Find Care experience built on the belief that finding care should feel as intuitive as any other online search.

Search that moves with the visitor

On the new site, AI search is ever present. A sticky navigation bar keeps the search bar visible at every scroll depth, on every page.

And it’s not just persistent; it’s responsive. The experience adapts based on how visitors interact with the site, surfacing suggestions shaped by what others have successfully searched and refined by St. Luke’s business rules.

Intent-driven results

Coveo’s AI adapts to what patients mean, not just what they type. When someone searches for a family medicine doctor for a new patient visit, results surface the most relevant providers first, ranked by what’s most likely to result in a booked appointment.

Query suggestions guide patients toward searches that others have found successful, reducing dead ends and keeping the path to care moving forward.

Filtering that reflects real patient needs

Patients can refine results in St. Luke’s Find-a-Doctor experience by location, specialty, insurance, whether a provider is accepting new patients, and whether online scheduling is available.

Behind the scenes, Coveo applies St. Luke’s business rules to prioritize providers based on organizational goals, with the flexibility to boost results as needed—so what patients see aligns with both their needs and the system’s capacity.

Scheduling surfaced in search results

Perhaps the most impactful change: for providers with online booking enabled, available appointment times appear directly in the search result card.

A patient can see that a provider has openings this week and click straight to booking.

The scheduling tool went from hard to find to impossible to overlook.

Location pages, built from scratch

Now, St. Luke’s has dedicated pages for every practice location—complete with maps, hours, and the providers associated with that site.

Patients can search for a type of care and seamlessly switch to the Locations tab to find the nearest St. Luke’s practice, with everything they need to take the next step.

It’s an area where many health systems are actively investing in and modernizing their digital experience, recognizing that location context is critical to how patients choose care.

With these new pages, St. Luke’s delivers a more connected, search-driven experience that makes it easier for patients to find and act.

The impact was immediate. Within a single month of their launch, online scheduling for primary care and OB/GYN roughly doubled.

“That kind of impact comes down to the experience, not the number of providers,” Garlich said.

Patients could finally see, at exactly the right moment, that booking was an option, and they took it. It was a clear signal that when search is intuitive and actionable, it doesn’t just improve the experience: it changes behavior.

“We knew we wanted to see improvements. But how quickly they happened, that was a real surprise,” Garlich added.

That early lift quickly validated the redesign. Online scheduling became a key KPI, reflecting not only stronger digital performance but also that more patients were entering the system and starting long-term care journeys.

The gains didn’t stop at launch. Coveo’s built-in analytics offers out-of-the-box and custom reporting dashboards, giving St. Luke’s visibility into how patients search, what they find, and where they get stuck. Content gaps, trending queries, and engagement signals now feed into a continuous improvement loop, helping the team test, measure, and act with confidence. An A/B testing program is already underway with Coveo’s customer success team helping keep the work focused and moving.

With that foundation in place, the focus has shifted from fixing a single experience to scaling it: extending the same intuitive, search-driven approach across more touchpoints in the patient journey, from discovery and provider search to scheduling and ongoing engagement.

The launch marked a turning point for St. Luke’s, but not the end of the work. With a strong foundation in place, the team turned their attention to extending that impact across the patient journey.

On the scheduling side, St. Luke’s now makes online booking available for new physicians one to two months before their start date, building the patient pipeline before a doctor’s first day. The team is also working to reduce friction for existing patients by streamlining the portal handoff, so their path feels as seamless as it does for new patients.

“This isn’t something you launch and walk away from,” Garlich said. “Coveo gives us the tools and insight to keep improving the experience over time.”

Looking ahead, St. Luke’s has planned out an ambitious roadmap with Coveo. Future milestones include:

• Surfacing all care modalities (urgent care, virtual visits, and more) directly within search results
• AI-guided experiences that help patients navigate their options
• Plain-language symptom and condition search powered by a customized healthcare taxonomy
• Ultimately, a generative AI interface that supports patients throughout their care journey

For an independent health system competing in a crowded regional market, that kind of flexibility matters. Search is no longer just a feature—it’s a foundation the organization can continue to build on as patient expectations evolve.