Harlow Creek Health System: a self-hosted CMS for hospitals and health systems, on open-source .NET

For each Raytha use case we take a realistic brief, hand it to an AI agent with the raytha CLI, and publish what comes out: the site, the files behind it, and a kit you can use to rebuild it yourself. This one is a hospital / health system website: find a doctor with specialty filters, locations and facilities, departments and services, patient and visitor information, health news, careers, events and classes, and a staff-only portal for clinician resources.

If you are looking for a self-hosted CMS for hospitals or an open-source .NET CMS for health systems, this is what a regional health system's public website looks like on Raytha. The agent built it on a fresh Raytha 2.0.1 instance. Nobody opened the admin. Every template, content type, item, page, menu and group went in through the CLI, from files in a directory.

Harlow Creek Health System is fictional. The people, clinics and documents are invented, and the site says so on every page. There is no real patient data.

Why hospital and health-system web teams look for a self-hosted CMS

A health system's public website is how patients find a doctor, a location and visitor information. It is also where marketing, clinical communications and IT have to agree on ownership, hosting and access. The questions tend to be the same:

• Keep the site in your own environment. Many hospital IT and compliance teams prefer to run public websites on infrastructure they already review, back up and monitor. Raytha is a .NET 10 application with PostgreSQL, shipped as a Docker image, so it can run on your own servers, in your own cloud account or with a hosting partner you already use. Self-hosting lets the organization keep the site under its own controls. That is not the same as a HIPAA certification claim for Raytha; compliance work for systems that touch protected health information is still the organization's responsibility, and this example is a public marketing site with no patient records.
• You own the code. Raytha is MIT-licensed. The templates, content types and content in this example are plain files you can keep in your own repository, so the site does not depend on one vendor staying in business or keeping its prices.
• It fits a .NET and Microsoft shop. Many health systems already run Windows, Active Directory, SQL Server and .NET line-of-business applications. Raytha is ASP.NET Core, so the team that patches your other .NET applications can host, review and extend it with tools they already know.
• Members-only areas without a second CMS. Raytha has public user accounts, user groups and per-group permissions, so a staff or clinician portal for policies and onboarding materials can sit behind a website sign-in. That sign-in is for the website only. It is not the electronic health record, which stays with your clinical systems.
• No per-seat pricing. There is no license fee per editor, per clinic or per page view, so marketing, communications, HR and clinical educators can all have accounts.
• Staff sign-in. Raytha supports SAML and JWT single sign-on, so the people who edit the site can use the identity provider you already have.

Raytha is a small open-source project, and it is not the right answer for every health system. If you want a vendor that hosts, supports and indemnifies the platform, or a full digital experience suite with marketing automation built in, a commercial CMS may fit better. For fair comparisons with platforms .NET teams often evaluate, see Raytha vs Kentico, Raytha vs DNN (DotNetNuke), Raytha vs Umbraco and Raytha vs WordPress.

What was built

Harlow Creek Health System is the website of a fictional regional health system with a 312-bed hospital, urgent care, primary care and specialty centers in Harlow Creek, Millhaven and Ashford Crossing. The site has:

• A home page with find-a-doctor search, quick tasks, featured departments, upcoming classes, news and locations.
• A providers directory (find a doctor) with filters for specialty and accepting new patients, plus telehealth flags and profile pages.
• Six locations: the medical center with a 24-hour emergency department, urgent care, a family clinic, and specialty centers for heart, cancer and orthopedics.
• Ten departments and services, from emergency and trauma to primary care and behavioral health, each with highlights and a phone number.
• Patient and visitor information: visitor guidelines, what to bring, billing FAQ, parking and imaging prep guides.
• Health news, events and classes (childbirth, diabetes, screenings, support groups) and careers with fictional openings.
• A staff portal behind a Raytha sign-in, with clinical policy digests, onboarding checklists and quick references for credentialed staff.
• An about page, contact directory, accessibility statement and search across providers, services, locations, news, events and resources.

The design is calm and trustworthy: a deep medical-blue header and hero, soft paper backgrounds, white cards and a warm copper accent for primary actions. Headings are set in Source Serif 4 and everything else in Figtree. No wide display fonts. The logo, illustrations, portraits and PDFs are generated by a script, so every image and document is license-free. On a 390px phone the navigation becomes a menu button and the provider cards and location grids stack cleanly.

How find a doctor, locations and the staff portal work

1. Each provider is a content item with specialty, credentials, location and department relationship fields, accepting-new-patients and telehealth checkboxes, and a portrait. The directory filters those fields with query parameters; the same items power search results and related links on department pages.
2. Each department relates to a location, so service pages can show where care is delivered without duplicating addresses.
3. The staff portal uses a Raytha user group. The page and staff-only resource templates check CurrentUser.UserGroups; signed out, those resources show a lock and a sign-in prompt instead of the file.

Try it yourself

The rebuild kit is in the public RaythaHQ/raytha-examples repository. Point the Raytha CLI at a fresh instance, run the example's build.sh, and you get the same content types, templates, pages and seed content. You can also deploy Raytha on Railway from the template to try a blank site quickly.