- Case Studies
- Patient portal enables diabetes patients to manage their disease
Patient portal enables diabetes patients to manage their disease
Client
Top 5 Pharma Company
Location
Germany
Industry
Pharmaceutical Manufacturing
About the project
The Digital Innovation and Business Excellence team, along with the diabetes team of a global leader in pharmaceutical manufacturing, wanted to refresh a patient portal. Their goal was to provide a newly designed portal built using new technologies where patients can read helpful information and get direct advice from HCPs through a dedicated forum.
The Challenges
Among the main challenges for the pharma company were:
1. The current patient portal had an outdated design and infrastructure and lacked integration with other innovation initiatives.
3. The existing portal was costly to maintain and update.
4. The current system needed many improvements to keep up with the latest SEO changes.
5. Building new similar portals for other therapeutics was difficult and time-consuming.
The Objectives
The main goal for the pharma company was to deliver a better experience to diabetes patients and provide helpful resources, tools, and direct access to healthcare professionals to manage their disease better, increase medication adherence, and improve health outcomes. To achieve that, they sought to:
1. Implement a new patient portal design that allows for easy communication with patients regarding their disease and how to best manage and live with diabetes.
2. Rebuild the existing expert forum, which patients use to ask HCPs direct questions, to fit into the new infrastructure and design.
3. Add new features to the expert forum that allow for better patient question distribution and management tools for HCPs in the network.
4. Increase the speed of creating new patient portals for other therapeutics by creating a modular system.
5. Reduce the costs of maintaining and updating patient portals by integrating them into existing infrastructure.
6. Increase organic traffic and improve patient engagement on the portal.
The Solutions
Our team of experts took a proactive approach, providing consultancy and advice on delivering the best solution that fits the timeline and budget while also enabling the pharmaceutical company to be better suited for future initiatives. Here are some of the solutions we delivered:
1. Implemented the new patient portal design.
2. Designed a modular infrastructure and tech stack to create new patient portals faster, cheaper, and easier.
3. Delivered a responsive and search engine-friendly patient portal with all the necessary features: content filtering, content recommendation, glossary, downloadable resources, and safe patient sign-up and login.
4. Re-created the expert forum as a modular system that is easy to use in other patient portals and therapeutic areas.
5. Added advanced expert forum features such as:
- Automatic HCP question assignment according to criteria such as type of question, topics, and expertise needed;
- HCP vacation mode: when certain HPCs are not available, their questions are automatically assigned to others in the network;
- The ability to pass the question to other HCPs with better expertise on a topic;
- Triggers and automation based on response time by HCPs to deliver timely answers to patient questions (e.g., if an HCP does not answer within a specific time frame, the question is assigned to another professional).
The Results
Our proactivity helped create a reusable system without impacting the timeline, budget, or scope. This approach allowed our pharma partner to experience the following benefits:
1. Reduced the time needed to launch new portals by 67% - from three months to one month.
3. Big cost savings in maintaining and updating this portal and others using the same infrastructure.
4. Increased efficiency in creating and managing the patient portal by all teams involved (content writing teams, review teams, marketing, HPCs, etc.).
Technologies Used
- Laravel
- Vue.js
- HTML5
- CSS3
Assembled Team
1
Project Manager
1
Quality Assurance
1
Full Stack Developer
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Product Owner
Pharma Company
The biggest win from my perspective was the proactivity shown by Digitalya's team, which made my implication minimal. Their expertise and knowledge helped us get a solution that we could easily reuse to launch a new patient portal in a third of the time as before.
Daniel Brunescu
COO & Project Manager, Digitalya
I'm most grateful that we never handle a project simply as task doers; instead, we get involved and influence the final solution to best fit current and future client needs by offering consultation in process efficiency, proposing new solutions, and striving for the reusability of our work. The same was true for this project—we delivered a system that exceeded expectations and is already used in other therapeutic areas and initiatives.
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