The Department of Emergency Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center sits inside a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital in Boston. Its physicians practice through Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians, and the department keeps starting new things: a network of community emergency departments, an international projects division, a disaster medicine fellowship, and now a division of AI.
The situation
Each of those needed its own website, for its own audience. Patients looking for the nearest emergency department. Physicians deciding whether to join, fellowship applicants from around the world, clinicians taking a course, and research partners weighing a collaboration.
Every site had to carry the Harvard and BIDMC names and still feel modern and easy to read, with real photography doing the work.
The emergency medicine network
The first site, in 2021, introduced the network: emergency departments and urgent care centers from Boston to New Bedford, with Boston as the hub. The department didn’t want it to read as all about Boston, so every hospital gets its own photo and write-up, and the community hospital in Plymouth sits on the page with the same weight as the trauma center in the city.
We built it in Squarespace in about three weeks. A small-caps serif and plenty of white space around an aerial photo of Boston set a calm, academic tone, and the department has kept the site current as the network has grown.
That summer, the same design became the site for the department’s International Projects Division, which builds emergency care systems and training programs with health systems abroad.
The Disaster Medicine Fellowship
The fellowship trains physicians in disaster medicine for a year, and it recruits applicants from around the world. We gave its site a different energy: a full-width photo of responders at work behind the program’s own description, with the application one click away on every page.
It launched in the summer of 2022, with the Harvard Medical School and BIDMC marks alongside the fellowship’s own.
The Disaster Medicine Institute
Fellowship faculty also teach online through the Disaster Medicine Institute. Its courses lived on a stock Thinkific storefront: a welcome line and a grid of products.
We rebuilt the front door in Pagy, with a clear headline about training responders, photography from the field, the institute’s partners, and pages for its courses and instructors. The courses still run on Thinkific, one click away.
The AI Division
The department’s newest division came to us with its site already drafted in ChatGPT, structure and copy included. We turned the draft into a Squarespace site the division’s staff can publish to themselves.
The division sits inside BIDMC, so the site wears the hospital’s header and blue. Custom-coded widgets handle what Squarespace can’t, like a swipeable shelf of research papers and a news feed that already carries the division’s awards and publications.
The outcome
The network site still runs on the structure we built in 2021. Since then, the department has come back each time it’s started something new.