Leading digital strategy inside a faith-based healthcare system with 12,800 employees and 100+ clinical locations — five major programs, two radically different stakeholder worlds, and the process infrastructure that held it all together.
Ascension — Seton Healthcare Family was the largest nonprofit healthcare system in Texas and one of the largest in the country: 12,800 employees, more than 100 clinical locations, and a 10,000-square-mile service area across central Texas. The system included four teaching hospitals — among them Dell Children's Medical Center and the only Level I adult trauma center in the region — and was preparing to become the primary training partner for Dell Medical School at UT Austin. The people using these digital systems were patients, physicians, and clinical staff at one of the most complex healthcare organizations in the state.
The digital team operated as an internal agency serving clinical, operational, and marketing stakeholders across multiple facilities and service lines. The environment was regulated, highly stakeholder-driven, and running on legacy infrastructure in several areas. The work included a patient-facing scheduling system integrated with legacy clinical software, a secure physician portal navigating Active Directory and SSO complexity, a major multisite Sitecore CMS migration, an employee giving platform built on Blackbaud, and the digital marketing infrastructure that ran across all of it. None of these programs were simple. Most involved simultaneous coordination across IT, security, compliance, legal, clinical operations, and external vendors — and every one of them had real users at the end of it.
I served as the primary delivery partner and advisor to clinical, operational, and marketing stakeholders — owning requirements discovery, guiding scope and feasibility decisions, and coordinating across IT, security, compliance, vendors, and internal teams. The internal agency model meant I was running multiple concurrent programs simultaneously, each with its own stakeholder group, timeline, and risk profile.
My boss designed the technical architectures. My job was to own client delivery within them — translating what stakeholders needed into requirements the technical team could build, and translating what the technical team was building back into terms the stakeholders could review and approve. Four years of being the person in the middle of two groups who spoke completely different languages.
Alongside the major program work, I operated the day-to-day platform: managing a WordPress Multisite network of more than a dozen SEO-optimized properties, applying governance rules to the steady stream of stakeholders who believed their service line deserved its own website, and pulling and presenting metrics to clients and executives on a regular cadence. The intake process I built wasn't just for big projects — it became the tool for having the governance conversation with business rules behind it.
Sitecore CMS migration — planning and discovery
Led migration planning, discovery, and preparation for the Sitecore migration — content strategy, technology planning, redirect governance, and stakeholder alignment. Delivered a full migration plan and best-practices review for the incoming team. My boss designed the architecture. The migration was executed after my departure.
Secure physician portal
Led requirements discovery for a secure portal serving physicians and clinical staff across multiple provider types. The discovery process itself was a program: an ongoing series of conversations with physicians — in person and over email — surfacing what they actually needed, what frustrated them, and what would make the portal worth using. Mapped the full provider type taxonomy, Active Directory dependencies, integration requirements, and access controls before a line of requirements was written. When I called the first cross-functional alignment meeting, it brought together people from across the organization who had never worked together before. The portal was never built — Ascension ended regional investment in the program before it launched. The discovery work was complete.
Online scheduling
Led the patient-facing online scheduling experience — requirements, vendor coordination, and stakeholder alignment across clinical operations and marketing. The patient UX needed to feel simple. The legacy scheduling systems underneath it were not. Holding those two realities together without letting either one win completely was the job.
Seton Foundations and Seton Cares
Designed the Seton Foundations website on a Convio/Blackbaud backend, and led requirements and delivery for Seton Cares — the annual employee giving platform. Seton Cares was a custom web application with payroll deduction logic, multi-fund selection, tribute giving, HR data autofill, and a full administrative console with role-based access and Raiser's Edge export. Complex requirements, regulated data, and a deadline tied to the annual giving campaign.
WordPress Multisite and platform governance
Operated the working web presence during my tenure: a WordPress Multisite network of more than a dozen SEO-optimized properties — topic websites covering Heart Care, Neurology, Cancer, and specialty programs alongside the parent seton.net. Managed governance for a steady stream of stakeholders who believed their service line deserved its own website, using the intake process I built to have that conversation with business rules behind it. Also wrote and launched the Seton Health Alliance website — a standalone property for a first-of-its-kind federally mandated program — working directly with program leadership to develop the messaging strategy from scratch.
Digital marketing, analytics, and reporting
Directed CRM-driven engagement programs and digital marketing operations across patient and provider audiences. Pulled, analyzed, and presented metrics to clients and executives on a regular cadence — in writing, in email, and in person. Managed campaign briefs, vendor relationships, and multi-channel execution in an environment where every communication touched compliance review.
The hardest thing about healthcare digital delivery is not the technology. It is the stakeholder gap. Clinical teams speak in patient outcomes, service lines, compliance obligations, and operational workflow. Technical teams speak in architectures, integrations, access controls, and implementation constraints. Marketing teams speak in campaigns, personas, and conversion funnels. All three need to agree on requirements before anything gets built, and they rarely start from the same place.
My job was to run discovery sessions that surfaced the real constraints before they became launch-day problems, write requirements documentation specific enough that technical teams could build to them without constant clarification, and create process maps and project briefs that let each stakeholder group see their piece of the program clearly without needing to understand everyone else's.
The physician portal work is the clearest example: before I could write a requirement, I had to document the full provider type taxonomy — what access each type needed, what clinical systems they touched, what the authentication model had to support. That discovery work was the project. The technical build was a consequence of it.
Four years in an internal agency environment taught me that the most durable thing a PM can build is not a website — it is the process that makes the next website easier. The artifacts below were adopted by management as team standards while I was there. The Digital Project Brief is available as a work sample.
Intake and scoping
Digital Project Brief template
A structured intake document covering process overview, team roles, approvals, strategy, audience goals, content and messaging, SEO keywords, translation requirements, design direction, forms, and analytics — all captured before any digital work began. Built to force the right conversations at kickoff rather than at launch. Adopted by management as the team's standard intake document.
Publishing governance
Content publishing workflow
A documented end-to-end process for publishing content to Seton-managed web properties — from rough draft through compliance and legal approval to digital optimization and go-live. Made the approval chain visible, reduced surprises, and gave stakeholders a shared understanding of what "content is final" actually meant.
Requirements documentation
Visual and descriptive requirements
Developed visual, descriptive, and spreadsheet versions of scope and requirements documents across multiple programs — choosing the format that matched the audience. A visual stakeholder gets a flow diagram. A technical stakeholder gets a data table. Both need to be looking at the same truth.
Artifact library
Sitemaps, wireframes, timelines, process maps
Sitemaps for complex multi-site architectures, wireframes for patient-facing experiences, project timelines for multi-year programs, and process documentation that made complex regulated-environment workflows legible to people who hadn't lived through building them. Work samples available on request.
Work sample: Digital Project Brief
The actual template, as used at Seton — with annotations explaining why each section exists. No client data; just the structure and the thinking behind it.
View the brief template →Led migration planning, discovery, and preparation for the Sitecore migration — content strategy, technology planning, redirect governance, and stakeholder alignment — and delivered a full migration plan and best-practices review for the incoming team.
Led requirements discovery for a complex secure physician portal — ongoing physician focus conversations, a full provider type taxonomy, cross-system integration mapping, and the first cross-functional alignment meeting that brought together stakeholders from across the organization who had never previously collaborated. The portal was not built due to Ascension's consolidation of regional programs. The discovery work was thorough and complete.
Delivered a patient-facing online scheduling experience that balanced modern UX expectations against the constraints of legacy clinical scheduling systems underneath.
Led requirements and delivery for Seton Cares, a custom employee giving platform — payroll deduction logic, multi-fund selection, HR data integration, Raiser's Edge export, and a full admin console — on a deadline tied to the annual giving campaign.
Built and launched the Seton Foundations website on a Convio/Blackbaud backend, supporting the philanthropic arm of a 12,800-person healthcare system.
Operated a WordPress Multisite network of more than a dozen SEO-optimized properties and governed platform access — using the intake process I built to manage stakeholder requests and apply consistent business rules across service lines.
Wrote and launched the Seton Health Alliance website for a first-of-its-kind federally mandated program — developing the messaging strategy from scratch in direct partnership with program leadership.
Created the Digital Project Brief template — adopted by management as the team's standard intake and scoping document, covering everything from audience goals to analytics requirements before any digital work began.
Documented a content publishing workflow with compliance and legal approval checkpoints built in — making the approval chain visible and reducing launch-day surprises.
Maintained working relationships across clinical, IT, marketing, compliance, and legal stakeholders simultaneously for four years — the kind of cross-functional trust that only exists because someone built it deliberately.