Treatment Program Overhaul

At the core of the Cancer Center’s online activities are the 43 treatment program microsites, representing its numerous disease-specific service lines. In response to a number of long-standing limitations in these microsites, in 2013 I initiated a plan to overhaul all of them – representing several hundred pages in all.

As you can see from this case study, because of the scale and complexity of the project, I employed an Agile methodology to envision, speculate, explore and adapt the stages of the project as it progressed.

Envisioning the Project Scope (Treatment Program Overhaul)

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The scope of this project was established by a multi-track audit of the treatment program sites, using three different approaches. Firstly, we surveyed and consulted with various clinical teams about their problems with the current templates. We then conducted a review of all the other top ten cancer centers’ sites, reviewing their feature-sets, information architecture and overall user experience. Lastly, we tested and explored possible improvements internally.

Competitor Analysis

Competitor Analysis

This audit revealed several key pain points for our clients, the clinical teams, and our principal users – patients and their family members.

I developed a charter of work to resolve these issue and offer new functionality. The charter included budget assignment, a staffing resource of 5 team members, and a framework of the project goals. The project’s overall aims were three-fold:

  1. to create a newly tailored, disease-specific user experience for site visitors to each microsite,
  2. to promote the pages with greatly improved optimized content, and
  3. to unify previously disparate information, like clinical trials listings and education materials, within these upgraded sites.
SEO research

SEO research

Finally, I created a timeline to allow the roll out of individual features and content improvements in stages.

Refining the Feature Set (Treatment Program Overhaul)

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Despite the constraints of the CMS the center operates within, I was able to establish multiple new features which could be developed and implemented in a rolling set of sprints, to greatly reduce the problems with the Treatment Programs as they stood.

An Overhauled Meet the Team Section

An Overhauled Meet the Team Section

These upgrades included features like engaging medical writers to develop custom patient education materials, thus improving our Google quality score and providing an alternative to previously bought-in (and outdated) content. Greater promotion of team members’ bios, headshots and profile information also improved scoring and presented the teams as more approachable to patients.

To ensure I had support from both leadership and clinical teams around the center, I created an outline of the proposal, which I presented to each of the 26 teams, and also to senior leadership. This established widespread buy-in and sponsorship for the project from the outset.

Working through Development Sprints (Treatment Program Overhaul)

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Once the project scope and feature-set was created, and I had established leadership sponsors, the team began working to build out elements. I maintained daily liaison with the 5 other members of the group: a content manager, a patient education specialist; a medical writer; an SEO analyst; and a contact in each clinical team for content review/approval.

Process Flow

Process Flow

Working with our internal clients presented some challenges, as leadership conceived of new development ideas, which we then needed to roll into subsequent sprints. Time-line management was also sometimes complex, given the number of different (and busy) clinical teams involved. I closely monitored and engaged with each team member, managing and revising expectations as new challenges presented themselves.