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Client overview
The client is a leader in the academic medicine community. Founded in 1876 and based in Washington, D.C., the client is a not-for-profit association dedicated to transforming healthcare through innovative medical education, cutting-edge patient care, and groundbreaking medical research. The client’s members represent the full spectrum of medical education, including 172 accredited U.S. and Canadian medical schools, 400+ major teaching hospitals and health systems, 80+ faculty and academic societies, 173,000+ full-time faculty members, 129,000+ resident physicians, and 89,000+ medical students.
Challenge
As a part of their digital strategy initiative, the client researched among its members and constituents. The research identified a crucial challenge—the creation and distribution of content. Despite being the primary channel for content distribution, the client’s website had its constraints. Some of the constraints were
- Content was not easily accessible
- The content was rarely viewed by users despite spending much time on the website.
- The client had over 33,000+ pages, including 6,000 PDFs, but the end-users viewed only 37% of the content, five times or less.
- Reports were not created, designed, and distributed for easy consumption.
- The content distributed was not associated with a subject matter expert but rather with the organization, which lowered the perceived value.
- Website was an informational 'attic' that stored all data instead of focusing on the latest information.
- The client distributed information for learners through disparate websites and technologies that lacked adequate search capabilities.
Technology and other issues
- The organization wanted to transition away from multiple legacy CMS systems, approaching the end of support onto a single, enterprise-class CMS.
- The client wanted to deliver a high-performance/high-security website with multi-browser and multi-device support to enable a seamless end-user experience.
- Build a content authoring and publishing interface that enables the organization to create and deliver timely content.
- Tight deadline for development and delivery of the redesigned website.
Solution
- Designed and migrated the website to a cloud-based Acquia/ Drupal platform as the enterprise CMS. The architectural emphasis was on the reusability and ease of migration of other client properties in the future.
- Worked closely with the organization’s content team to build an inventory of relevant content to migrate to the new site.
- Built an advanced, federated search functionality that would enable end-users to search for relevant content across client properties.
- Built a modern page-building feature (using layout builder in Drupal) for ease of use and improved experience for content authors and publishers.
- Developed a unified information/content architecture and tools to group data and reports to discover relevant data and resources by end-users easily.
- Built a content model to create content with biographies of specific authors and subject matter experts.
- Designed the site to use state-of-the-art front-end architecture, content delivery network, multi-layered caching for robust performance and security.
- Served as both the developer of the website and service integrator, working with the client and multiple vendors.
- Adopted a fast-track delivery approach involving multiple product owners and multiple scrum teams worldwide to meet a tight deadline.
Benefits
- With the new website's timely launch, the client made major progress in its digital strategy roadmap—specifically in driving greater utilization of data and resources.
- Content clean-up before migration improved information architecture and organization of data/reports. As a result, the website became a source of the latest academic medicine content and a hub for data.
- The client could cull 85% of the rarely or never viewed content by end-users —creating a clutter-free user experience.
- New user-friendly and simplified page creation, content authoring, and publishing workflow-enabled content teams to create and share content in a timely fashion.
- Federated search implementation provided the capability to bring content from different sites and generate search results that showed the most relevant content.
- Associated content with biographies of subject matter experts and enhanced content credibility.
- Standardized CMS platform ensured reusability of building blocks across sites—providing cost optimization for future site builds.
- The use of CDN ensured fast page loads and made the website highly responsive, enhancing the end-user experience.
