Freedom Drug, a subsidiary of Priority Healthcare, is a specialty mail-order pharmacy that operates a series of content destination sites, or neighborhoods, for specific disease state communities. Freedom Drug's primary business goal for these sites is to build a community of opt-in registered users who may need the services of a specialty pharmacy. As such, the site needed to perform quickly, and be engaging, intuitive and easy to use. Freedom Drug tasked Miller Systems with improving the overall subscriber experience and enhancing each neighborhood's performance. Miller Systems worked with Freedom Drug to develop a fresh design approach, replace its limited, content management system, augment its email content creation tools, and improve its hosting performance.
With an existing subscriber base and several useful applications already in place, including chat, message boards and physician/clinician directories, the challenge for Miller Systems was to integrate pre-existing technology while improving the overall user and content management experience. Additionally, Miller Systems was confronted with the task of creating reusable components across each of Priority Healthcare's disease state specific neighborhoods. These components included information architecture, content management workflow and templates, clinic/physician directories, and search functionality. Finally, as subscribers transitioned from existing neighborhoods to the newly redesigned offerings, Miller Systems' challenge was to provide a seamless experience that would not require any changes to the existing subscriber logins and passwords.
TECHNOLOGIES USED:
1. RedDot Professional CMS 2. dataDriver ePush 3. SQL Server 4. Microsoft .NET 5. Web Services
Setting to work, Miller Systems collaborated with Priority Healthcare's internal design team to create a new look and feel across each of the neighborhoods. Recognizing Priority Healthcare's extensive content management requirements, Miller Systems implemented RedDot Solutions' enterprise class RedDot Professional content management system. At the same time, Miller Systems worked with the Priority Healthcare development team to reuse existing chat and message board applications and integrate them with the new content management system. Leveraging its engineering expertise, Miller Systems developed a new physician directory from the ground up using Microsoft's .NET and SQL Server, which also included the creation of a more scalable, extensible data model and zip code based proximity searches. Additionally, Miller Systems helped Priority Healthcare to improve intra-site search functionality by aggregating disparate content collections and elegantly presenting the results in context. To manage the subscriber database requirements, Miller Systems implemented its award-winning dataDriver ePush marketing communications engine, creating a custom Web Services based API to integrate the chat and message boards. Lastly, Miller Systems designed and implemented a robust, redundant hosting infrastructure, including Layer 4-7 content switching, and co-located the entire solution in their enterprise class Cable and Wireless/Exodus facility, where it is managed by the Miller Systems IT Infrastructure team.
With the first neighborhood complete, Priority Healthcare has already achieved great economy of scale: future neighborhoods will only take approximately 30% of time and labor it took to complete the initial engagement! With improved performance, speed and reliability and an easy-to-use, well supported, commercially available content management system, Miller Systems and Priority Healthcare together made vast improvements to the overall user experience. Of particular benefit was the ease with which existing subscribers made the transition to the new neighborhoods without having to re-subscribe. With all of these improvements in place, the team at Priority Healthcare provides subscribers with easier access to better content and resources, which ultimately leads patients to solutions that can have a positive impact on their quality of life, and provide them with support they need from professionals and other individuals who are in similar medical situations.
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