Case Study: AccessMedicine
McGraw-Hill Professional
http://www.accessmedicine.com
Background
The Professional division of McGraw-Hill Education, a leading global provider of instructional, assessment, and reference solutions with offices in 33 countries, established its prominence as a provider of online medical information when it launched Harrison's Online in 1998, providing the highly respected content of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine. In May 2004, McGraw-Hill contracted with Silverchair not only to redevelop Harrison's Online but also to expand the website into AccessMedicine, which would launch with an additional high-value textbook and 17 student texts in the famous Lange series. McGraw-Hill's ambitious goals for the redeployment included the following:
- Establish AccessMedicine as a product that would outpace competitors in the online medical aggregation space, while meeting the needs of users attracted to brief summaries of clinical information as provided by UptoDate.
- Vastly improve the platform by deploying (1) a design that met high standards for usability, (2) a highly accurate search engine, and (3) an information architecture that allowed McGraw's signature brands to shine alone and as part of a complete clinical library.
- Choose a development partner that could serve not only as a technology provider but also as an experienced developer knowledgeable about the demands of the medical market.
- Launch the new site in 6 months.
Project
Silverchair led requirements analysis discussions with McGraw throughout May and June of 2004 and took the lead in planning the aggressive schedule of customizations to the Silverchair Content Manager (SCM) platform that would best serve McGraw's short-term and long-term goals for the site. The focus of the redevelopment effort was three-pronged.
- The front-end of the application used semantic meta-data to deliver highly accurate and relevant search results and to make topical connections between the large amount of content. The use of semantic meta-data ensured that AccessMedicine would not be the digital equivalent of a shelf of books but a matrix of inter-related medical information.
- The back-end of the application featured an e-commerce solution that allowed customers to buy both single titles and collections of titles, and that included an easy-to-use tool for management by McGraw-Hill staff.
- Silverchair's online authoring system was customized to allow McGraw-Hill authors, editors, and staff to create and publish daily clinical updates directly to the site.
Result
In November 2004, Silverchair launched AccessMedicine with a new edition of Harrison's, Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment (CMDT), and 17 Lange titles in a completely new user interface that had undergone rigorous usability testing. The content had been indexed with semantic meta-data to allow users to quickly and accurately find content that was 100% relevant to their search query, and this meta-data also drove dynamic related links that connected all related information on the application for ease of linking from one resource to another. Silverchair integrated a database of drug monographs with all clinical content and also developed a self-assessment tool for Harrison's that allows users to take quizzes and receive reading lists on topics for further study.
Notable
- Since the relaunch of the site in November 2004, the volume of searches run on AccessMedicine has increased 643%.
- AccessMedicine was a finalist in the Software & Information Industry Association's (SIIA) 21st Annual Codie Awards and received the Corporate Achievement Award for Innovation within the McGraw-Hill Companies in 2006.
- Since initial redeployment in November 2004, AccessMedicine has evolved into an extensive online collection of content and tools and includes the following:
- 11 clinical textbooks
- 37 Lange student texts
- Grand Rounds
- Primary care practice guidelines
- Differential diagnosis tool
- Patient education
- Health care news
- Podcasts and RSS feeds
- Daily clinical updates
- Quick Access tool for internal medicine
- Image Bank and "Lightbox" functionality
- Lab test information with tables of normal and abnormal lab values
- Emergency medicine photo gallery and procedural videos
- Hundreds of self-assessment questions linked not only to answers but also to topical reading lists for further study
Next: AHRQ Patient Safety Network