Selecting the right healthcare content management system (CMS) is crucial to building a website that enhances patient engagement, ensures compliance, and streamlines operations. But with hundreds of options available, how can your healthcare organization select the right one?
Understanding key features to look for and evaluating top providers is a great starting point. This guide will cover everything you should know about CMS technology for healthcare and how to select the best system for your needs, including:
- The Role of a Healthcare Content Management System
- Key Features of a CMS for Healthcare
- Choosing the Right CMS for Your Healthcare Organization
- How Kanopi Can Help You Choose the Right Healthcare CMS
- Top Healthcare Content Management Platforms in 2025
- Tips for Implementing Your Healthcare CMS Successfully
Whether your organization is a hospital, private medical practice, mental health clinic, or other healthcare provider, our tips will give you a clear roadmap to choosing and implementing a healthcare content management platform that exceeds your expectations.
What is the Role of a Healthcare Content Management System?
To answer this question, let’s start by defining a content management system (CMS). CMS platforms provide the digital infrastructure organizations need to build viable websites. These tools enable centralized control over content creation, publishing, and data governance.
Therefore, healthcare content management systems are tailored platforms that healthcare providers can use to:
- Ensure the timely delivery of accurate health information.
- Support compliance with regulations like HIPAA and ADA.
- Integrate seamlessly with other digital tools like EHRs and CRMs, allowing your organization to keep all patient and stakeholder data organized and prevent data siloes.
A well-implemented CMS empowers healthcare marketers, administrators, office staff, and clinicians to collaborate effectively and deliver optimized digital experiences for patients.
Key Features of a CMS for Healthcare
Leveraging a CMS to build your healthcare website (rather than custom-building a website through HTML) offers plenty of benefits.
For starters, most healthcare organizations’ marketing and communications teams lack the technical expertise required to build and maintain a custom-coded website. CMS platforms greatly simplify the content management process, allowing your organization to maintain all relevant content (images, text, videos, PDFs, etc.) in one easily accessible location. Plus, these solutions offer user-friendly content editing tools to make creating and publishing web content simple.
Here are a few additional features of using a CMS for healthcare website management:
HIPAA Compliance
A secure CMS ensures patient data is protected according to HIPAA standards, enhancing audience trust and avoiding legal issues. If your healthcare organization deals with protected health information (PHI) electronically, you must comply with the relevant HIPAA regulations.
A healthcare CMS can provide the following necessary services to comply with HIPAA and maintain the privacy and security of PHI:
- Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC): A secure CMS allows administrators to set user permissions, ensuring only authorized staff members can see or update private patient information.
- Data encryption: A HIPAA-compliant content management system (CMS) ensures that data is encrypted both in storage and during transmission, which helps minimize the chances of unauthorized access.
- Secure hosting: Using a HIPAA-compliant hosting provider ensures physical and network safeguards are in place.
- Backup and disaster recovery: A compliant CMS includes secure backup systems and recovery protocols, which are essential under HIPAA’s administrative safeguard requirements.
- Business Associate Agreements (BAAs): Reputable CMS vendors and hosting providers offer BAAs, confirming their responsibility for safeguarding PHI as required by HIPAA.
Scalability
The right CMS will support your organization’s growth and evolving content needs.
Your content publishing platform should make it easier to create, upload, and push new content live in a timely manner, ensuring you can keep your audience updated on the latest developments in the healthcare space and pertinent information about your organization’s services.
Content creators should also be able to create their own departments, divisions, and other parts of the site’s data architecture as their organizations expand.
Accessibility
Healthcare websites must comply with ADA guidelines to serve users of all abilities.
A CMS helps make your website accessible to users with disabilities, such as individuals using screen readers, needing keyboard navigation, or requiring high-contrast visuals. You can easily add accessibility elements like alternative text for images, logical headings, and intuitive navigation.
This ensures inclusivity, expands audience reach, and reduces legal risk.
Additional Features to Look For in a Healthcare CMS
- User-friendly editing interface: Allows content managers and healthcare staff to update content easily without coding knowledge.
- Integration capabilities: Connects seamlessly with EHRs, CRMs, scheduling systems, marketing platforms, and other third-party tools to streamline operations and patient care.
- Unified data platform: Enables centralization of all web and content data, eliminating fragmentation across multiple branches, departments, or regional chapters.
- Multilingual capabilities: Ensures users can translate web content into their preferred language. This is especially essential for healthcare organizations that serve multilingual communities.
These features will enable your organization to set up your new website to support your current priorities and grow with you over time.
Choosing the Right CMS for Your Healthcare Organization
In addition to seeking out the right features, there are several other factors your organization should discuss to help you choose a system suited to your unique needs. Keep these considerations in mind during your selection process:
Open Source vs. Proprietary
As you search for the right content management platform for your organization, you’ll likely encounter two terms over and over again: open source and proprietary. But which one is best for your needs? Let’s explore the basics and benefits of each platform type.
What is a proprietary CMS?
Definition: A proprietary CMS is a closed platform that is managed and controlled by a single company. These systems are considered “closed” because they offer minimal opportunities to manipulate the source code to customize your site.
Examples: Adobe Experience Manager, Squarespace, WebMED Ignite, Tebra, Salesforce Health Cloud
Benefits:
- Customer support: Proprietary platforms often offer hands-on, responsive customer support.
- Industry specifics: These solutions can be tailored to specific industries for greater personalization to your needs.
- Familiarity: If you already use other software solutions from a certain provider, you can also leverage their proprietary CMS for simplicity and familiarity.
Best for: Organizations that can get by with limited customization or that want to remain in the same ecosystem as their other software solutions
What is an open-source CMS?
Definition: An open-source CMS is a free content management tool that allows users to control the code to create customized websites with greater flexibility and ease.
Examples: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla
Benefits:
- Customization: Users have access to full customization and portability of the code, without being restricted by vendor lock-ins.
- Extensive functionality: Modules, plugins, integrations, and themes allow you to access robust customization options and extend your website’s functionality.
- Large support community: These platforms have large, active developer communities, ensuring your organization can benefit from the insights of experienced professionals in the space.
- Ongoing improvement: Because these platforms are continuously evolving and improving, you can access dynamic new features and enhancements quickly and easily incorporate them into your website.
- Strong security: Since open-source software allows anyone to view and manipulate the code, developers can identify security issues and deploy fixes faster.
- Scalability: The flexibility of open-source solutions allows organizations to scale up their websites easily as they grow and acquire new audiences.
- Flexibility with integrations: Open source tools facilitate thousands of integrations, whereas proprietary systems often restrict integrations.
Best for: Organizations looking for cost-effective, flexible, customizable software that can easily scale as your organization grows
Which type of CMS is best?
Ultimately, the choice lies with your organization. However, if you choose to go with an open-source platform, the development team at Kanopi is standing by to help you create an optimized website for your organization’s needs.
Organizational Size and Needs
Match your CMS capabilities with your organization’s scale and complexity. Large, complex organizations with multiple branches, locations, or chapters benefit from robust platforms like Drupal or Adobe Experience Manager. Smaller organizations with more straightforward digital needs may find that a user-friendly platform like WordPress offers the support and structure needed to get a site up and running quickly.
Budget Constraints
As you review the costs of different CMS platforms, consider potential expenses holistically. This ensures you’re getting the full picture of the website’s true costs.
Evaluate the total cost of ownership, including:
- Licensing
- Design and development
- Ongoing maintenance
Before making a final decision, consider each platform’s potential return on investment (ROI). Use this formula to calculate potential ROI: ROI % = (Estimated Revenue from CMS / Cost of CMS) x 100.
For example, let’s say your hospital gets a proposal from a web developer. Under this proposal, you would spend $96,000 on web services annually. This cost would include ongoing design enhancements, annual hosting fees, and maintenance and support.
With an enhanced website, perhaps your hospital could earn revenue via digital appointment bookings and greater patient retention due to a more professional, user-friendly web presence. You already know that your average revenue per patient is $750, and you estimate that a better website could attract 300 more patients per year. As a result, the additional revenue you bring in would be $225,000 per year.
Here’s what the ROI calculation would look like:
ROI % = ($225,000 / $96,000) × 100 = 234.375%
In other words, for every dollar your hospital spends on website fees, you’d earn about $2.34 in revenue.
As you perform this calculation, keep in mind that increasing your ROI isn’t just about keeping costs low—it’s about making smart investments that will set your organization up for long-term success. These investments include a robust, helpful CMS.
Health Equity Considerations
Consider the diverse health equity needs of the community you serve when choosing the right CMS for your organization.
Ensure your CMS provides:
- Multilingual capabilities for the most common languages spoken in your community
- Inclusive forms that offer flexibility for questions about honorifics, names, pronouns, gender, etc.
- Culturally inclusive content, such as inclusive and diverse imagery and culturally-sensitive messaging
- Accessibility features that promote equitable access to healthcare resources for all communities
Top Healthcare Content Management Platforms in 2025
Now that you know what to consider when searching for a healthcare CMS, let’s examine the specifics of some of the top solutions available. Carefully review this list to get an idea of what each platform can offer your organization regarding features, HIPAA compliance, developer support, and affordability.
1. Drupal
Drupal is a free, open-source content management solution well-known for its flexibility, security, and broad developer community. Drupal is highly customizable and extensible, enabling users to create websites that grow sustainably over time.
Fast Facts about Drupal
- Open source or proprietary? Open source.
- Top Features: Highly customizable, modular content structures, strong multilingual support, scalability for enterprise-level organizations, and comprehensive security.
- Best For: Large healthcare systems and organizations needing extensive custom development, website flexibility, and powerful security.
- HIPAA Considerations: Offers robust security features; HIPAA compliance depends on hosting and securely storing and transmitting data to site users and services like developer workflows.
- Pricing: Free (open-source), but you’ll need to factor in development and maintenance costs.
How Kanopi helps healthcare organizations create incredible Drupal sites
Kanopi’s web development team has extensive Drupal experience. Each of our team members has, on average, over 10 years of experience with Drupal design and development. We also have strong partnerships with Pantheon and Acquia, our preferred hosting partners for Drupal. That means we can make more accurate recommendations for your website hosting needs.
Check out our Drupal case studies for a look at how we support healthcare websites built on Drupal:
- Full build case study: Kanopi worked with Eye Recommend, a network of optometrists, to enhance their site and provide a stronger foundation for simplified member access and analytics tracking. We migrated their site to a newer version of Drupal, audited and strengthened the user experience, and simplified the internal directory structure. These changes resulted in 10% more mobile users.
- Support case study: The Colorado Health Foundation needed a more streamlined website to better serve its mission of improving statewide health. We supported the organization with simplified navigation tailored to users’ needs, a content audit to streamline priorities, and enhanced accessibility. These improvements led to greater performance across the site.
2. WordPress
WordPress is the world’s most-used content management system, powering over 40% of all websites. It’s a free, open-source tool known for a simple user experience, powerful customization through themes and plugins, and versatility.
Fast Facts about WordPress
- Open source or proprietary? Open source.
- Top Features: User-friendly interface, vast plugin ecosystem, customizable templates.
- Best For: Any healthcare providers and clinics with limited internal dev resources.
- HIPAA Considerations: Can be HIPAA-compliant with proper plugins, third-party hosting, and configurations.
- Pricing: Free core platform; plugin and hosting costs vary.
How Kanopi helps healthcare organizations create incredible WordPress sites
Kanopi’s WordPress developers can step in at any stage of website development to build a flexible, customized, secure WordPress website. Our developers are thought leaders, regularly speaking at WordPress conferences and events. Plus, our strong partnerships with hosting partners Pantheon and WP Engine enable us to make tailored, strategic recommendations for the best website hosting option for your organization.
Review our WordPress client studies to see our development and support in action:
- Full build case study: The Cohen Veterans Network had a (good) problem: their services were expanding to new clinics across the U.S., but their website couldn’t scale up alongside these positive developments. Kanopi built a new web presence with the organization’s existing branding, modernized design, and enhanced navigation. The new site is well-positioned to connect with the organization’s core user groups.
- Support case study: The Linked Immunization Action Network needed a better way to serve their audience of healthcare providers in middle-income countries, which frequently have unreliable internet access. They worked with Kanopi to enhance website performance and improve navigation and the user experience. Our efforts resulted in major improvements in desktop and mobile page load speeds.
3. Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)
Adobe Experience Manager is a cloud-based CMS that is part of the Adobe Experience Cloud suite of tools. It offers a CMS, a digital asset manager, enrollment and forms functionality, a signage solution, and a tool for creating product documentation.
Fast Facts about Adobe Experience Manager
- Open source or proprietary? Proprietary.
- Top Features: Plug-and-play functionality, what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editor, and scalability and security through the cloud.
- Best For: Marketing teams that already leverage other Adobe tools, like Analytics or Campaign.
- HIPAA Considerations: AEM can be configured to meet HIPAA compliance when deployed in Adobe’s Managed Services environment with proper safeguards (BAA, secure hosting, etc.).
- Pricing: Custom quote based on needs and website scale.
4. WebMD Ignite
WebMD Ignite offers proprietary CMS functionality as part of its Digital Experience Engine. This tool allows healthcare organizations to build robust websites, boost engagement and conversions through targeted marketing content, and easily maintain HIPAA compliance.
Fast Facts about WebMD Ignite
- Open source or proprietary? Proprietary.
- Top Features: No-code visual page builder, content personalization based on UTM codes, and data centralization.
- Best For: Healthcare organizations and systems that want to prioritize creating a unified online brand experience.
- HIPAA Considerations: Leverages a proprietary analytics platform powered by Freshpaint to ensure all multichannel campaigns, microsites, landing pages, and clinical content products remain HIPAA compliant.
- Pricing: Contact the sales team for a demo and pricing information.
Tips for Implementing Your Healthcare CMS Successfully
Your work is not done after you choose a CMS for your healthcare organization. You’ll have to create a strategy for maximizing your new platform to ensure it drives a high ROI and supports your goals.
Take these steps to implement your new tool effectively:
- Stakeholder engagement: Involve key stakeholders in the selection and planning process for your new CMS. Offer demos or free trials so they can get a good sense of how the software works.
- Content audit: Review existing content for relevance and compliance with regulations like HIPAA and the ADA. Consider whether combining or eliminating certain content will make your site easier to use.
- Workflow and user audit and analysis: Define the roles that each team member will take within the content management process. Consider restricting roles based on team members’ specific responsibilities to ensure greater security and fewer opportunities for breaches.
- Training: Provide comprehensive training for site administrators and clear instructions for your users (patients, patient families, or healthcare providers). Make sure site admins know how to update and add new content without causing disruptions. You should also ensure your site includes clear calls to action and instructions for using features like your patient portal or telehealth services.
- Testing: Conduct thorough testing to ensure full functionality and compliance. Gather input from internal stakeholders and improve the site as needed before deployment.
- Launch and monitor: Deploy the CMS and continuously monitor performance and user feedback. Track analytics such as page visits, bounce rate, and time spent on page.
How Kanopi Can Help You Choose the Right Healthcare CMS
Your website’s CMS should align with your organization’s other digital marketing efforts and offer a smooth user experience for visitors and healthcare marketing staff. Finding this balance can be challenging—that’s where working with a web development team comes in handy.
Kanopi Studios works with healthcare organizations of all sizes to help them find the right CMS for their unique needs and audiences. We keep your organization’s values and core priorities in mind during our collaborative process. Here are the steps we take to set healthcare organizations like yours up for CMS success:
- Evaluate your website needs, including functionality, scalability, and accessibility.
- Based on the considerations above, determine which CMS would work best for your organization and help justify the choice to stakeholders.
- Manage your website migration, design, development, and more to ensure long-term success.
Curious about what it’s like to work with Kanopi? Check out our case study and webinar on our work with the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Department of Surgery. We helped this organization move its website onto Drupal, where we created a welcoming site with an approachable front-end look and a simplified back-end editing experience.
Wrapping Up
Choosing the right healthcare CMS is a strategic decision that impacts patient engagement, operational efficiency, and compliance. By understanding your organization’s unique needs and evaluating top CMS options, you can implement a solution that supports your goals and enhances your digital presence.
For more information, explore these additional resources:
- 7 HIPAA-Compliant Website Analytics Tools for Healthcare. Ensure your website analytics tools protect PHI with this comprehensive guide to HIPAA-compliant solutions.
- The New Federal ADA Guidelines: What They Mean for Websites. Stay up to date with the latest ADA guidelines for websites using this resource.
- Healthcare Web Development: Your Complete Guide for 2025. Explore the details of what it’s like to work with a healthcare web developer in this step-by-step guide.