Advantus Health Partners is a healthcare supply chain group purchasing organization (GPO) and a subsidiary of Bon Secours Mercy Health (BSMH). The project involved building a private, members-only portal for the organization's authenticated users, completed while consulting with Digital Yalo.
The authentication architecture was the most technically distinctive aspect of the project. Rather than a standard WordPress login, the portal used SAML-based single sign-on (SSO) integrated with the BSMH Active Directory. This meant that users authenticated through BSMH's enterprise identity provider before being granted access to the Advantus portal, eliminating separate credential management for the platform and ensuring access control aligned with BSMH's existing directory infrastructure.
The main portal was built on WordPress with a custom Elementor theme, presenting members-only content in a clean, professional layout appropriate for a B2B healthcare supply chain context. A separate BuddyPress installation was customized and integrated as a social and forum component, giving authorized users a structured space for discussion and community interaction within the authenticated environment.
The project also required significant development operations and server administration work — setting up environments, managing data migration, and configuring infrastructure to support the SSO integration and the dual WordPress/BuddyPress architecture. Coordinating these technical layers within a single project required close attention to environment configuration and the interactions between the SAML authentication flow, the main WordPress installation, and the BuddyPress component.
