Michigan Medicine
Website | Healthcare | Information Architecture
Client Background
Every year, UofMHealth.org serves nearly 6 million visitors looking for health providers, clinics and medical facilities, and health information, with over 14 million pageviews. As such, having a user-friendly website is crucial to Michigan Medicine’s mission of providing outstanding health and patient care.
The Problem
Michigan Medicine’s pain points were threefold:
- Taxonomy: The collection of medical and health information wasn’t optimally organized, lacked intuitive tagging and classification, and wasn’t integrated with other health databases and medical research institutions.
- Physician Finder: The search only had basic filters that made it difficult for patients to find their ideal physician out of a database of 3,100+ medical professionals. In addition, multiple search fields used a fixed list of choices for names and specialties so users needed to know the exact spelling or terminology.
- Physician Profiles: Physician profiles weren’t updated immediately to reflect clinic address changes, and might not have listed a doctor’s official medical credentials with the exact wording on their board certification.
Project Overview
- Re-architected the content and information on the Drupal site
- Upgraded Drupal versions
- Implemented Solr and new taxonomy
- Integrated with many healthcare and medical research institution databases
- Databases and medical information always up-to-date
- Trained site admins in Google Analytics
The Solution
Logic Solutions was awarded this contract based on our extensive history and experience with Drupal and Solr, integration with other systems, and strength in information architecture.
Taxonomy
Logic helped create a strong, best-in-class core taxonomy and customized it to meet Michigan Medicine’s specific needs. Building upon the existing structure that was loosely based on ABMS specialties, Logic strengthened the taxonomy by adapting from leading medical taxonomies, benchmarking it to major medical research institutions, and unifying it with SNOMED taxonomy to tag and integrate with Health Library content. It uses best practices by matching with the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and integrates Concept Unique Identifier (CUI) codes from the medical metathesauraus. Additionally, the new taxonomy matches Michigan Medicine’s credentialing requirements and updates every evening so that the latest medical information is always available.
The new system gives Michigan Medicine content admins an organized, relevant, and clear means of tagging and quickly classifying content. Admins are now empowered with a full understanding of Drupal’s powerful taxonomy features, and the training and tools to leverage this functionality in order to better organize and display current medical information and adapt to future data changes. The taxonomy unifies site content, office, and clinic locations, and physician information and specialties.
Physician Finder
Drupal’s built-in search functionality wasn’t enough to handle Michigan Medicine’s directory of physicians in the University of Michigan’s medical facilities. So Logic implemented Solr, one of the most powerful and popular enterprise search engines to create a more intuitive user experience.
Users can now enter any search term into a single field. They don’t need to differentiate between a specialty, area of practice, condition or treatment, or physician name, and the new search combines all of these search fields into one.
An intuitive custom autosuggest functionality searches on three letters anywhere in the data, thereby resolving the issue of users needing to know exact medical terminology or spelling. The search begins immediately and searches terms “on the fly” as the user types. Logic implemented synonyms so, for example, users searching for “heart” also receive results for “cardiac” or “thoracic.”
Search results are more accurate, flexible, and precise. Users can filter by conditions and treatments, locations, specialty areas, gender, and more. They can also drill down from a wider search to a narrower list of results, making it easier to find a provider faster with more accuracy and precision.
Phisician Profiles
From facility locations to physician names to areas of specialties, Michigan Medicine has thousands of pieces of information that make up the physician’s profile on the Drupal site, all of which have to be accurate and updated regularly. To unify all of this data, Logic’s developers integrated with the credentialing database via EMPI, and MyUofMHealth to obtain the highest quality and most up-to-date data on a timely basis. Locations (facilities), physicians (physician profiles and clinic locations, and specialties are now unified and always accurate. This solution resolved issues of specialties listed in the incorrect order and with incorrect (or unofficial) names. Specialties now match CACTUS, the medical credentialing database.
Other
In addition to improving Michigan Medicine’s taxonomy and search, Logic also extensively trained site admins in Google Analytics on how to better understand their site traffic, from visitor demographics to site and page flow to user behavior. Logic also helped them create individualized custom Google Analytics views and eliminate hours spent each month creating manual reports. With this new knowledge, the site and content admins can slice and dice the user data to predict user behavior and understand how their target audience are using the Michigan Medicine site to find their medical and health information.
“The Logic team was collaborative and flexible throughout the tenure of a complex project, providing expertise in multiple areas, from delivering search analytics data to help shape team decisions, to consulting on our website’s core taxonomy, to assistance in creating a new data migration process. Their careful documentation helped keep the project on track, and we were very happy with the final result.”
– Monica Getz, Senior Digital Brand Strategist at Michigan Medicine