Creating a content management system that is useful and legally compliant

Before I joined SERMO, I had heard tales of how difficult it is to make anything for the Pharma industry. I have learned how incredibly risk averse they are. I have learned that every brand within a company has its own MLR(medical legal Review) team. And I have learned that they don't want anything until another pharma company has it and has deemed it necessary.

When I started working on enhancements to pages, I had no idea for the uphill battle I was in for. Because one of my teams was tasked with improving pages, and to me that meant I needed to make something that had more value.

To them, I needed to make something that was legally compliant. Pages is a content management system that allows 3rd party companies to create content and interact with doctors in a controlled space, that keeps doctors anonymous to the 3rd party companies but still guarantees specialty and country targeting on all content.

Adding Value

We have two broad categories of users on our Pages platform. We have Pharma companies, that are broken down into marketing agencies that represent Pharma brands and Pharma companies themselves. We also have non-Pharma clients, which are made up of non-profits like Doctors without Boarders, news networks like Stat News, sponsored doctors who are handpicked from our community, and Pharma adjacent organizations like GoodRX.

In order to identify how to add value, we needed to understand what different types of users would want to do. The first enhancement was for non-profits organizations. They were one of our two early adopter groups on our platform. Groups like Doctors Without Boarders and the American Heart Association needed to be able to leverage our platform in more than just a promotional manner. We wanted to partner with them to help them use our user base to help solve patient cases. Our current platform allowed making generic posts that could be used to describe a patient case. But allowing them access to use our patient case tags would place the post into our normal Patient Case workflow. That meant that they could target specialties and those specialties would receive an email asking them for their opinions on the patient case. This would give Doctors Without Boarders the ability to save lives on patients that they do not have expertise on as well as promote their brand as an organization that still deals with complex problem.

The first enhancement, adding our patient case workflow to the MVP of the platform

After adding patient cases, we quickly discovered that a patient case receives less engagement when the user does not add a poll on their patient case. We wanted to drive up engagement on these patient cases as well as give Non-profits a way to have a low-touch interaction with doctors. I wanted to create a less over-whelming UI for polling than our current membership platform has. I designed a progressive disclosure form that would remain minimal if the user didn't want a poll and would only display immediately needed information.

Minimized poll form

Expanded Poll form

Expanded Poll form

A few months after we introduced patient cases, our sales team came to us with an issue that they noticed was effecting our news organizations. The problem was the ordering of content on their pages. Stat news would post 4-5 times a day, but they had 1 key post a week that would get buried in the time based sort of content.

I set out to explore the easiest way to implement a heuristic solution to keeping content organized so that news organization could post as much as they want without having key articles pushed into an infinite scroll. I first tried to explore sorting algorithms that would put active content at the top of the list. But when talking to users, another pain point came up; they want direct control over which posts are critical. So I designed a feature that would allow users to select and pin a post to the top of the page. This solved their pain points and could be expanded into our roadmap to add RSS feed slurping to the platform.

Client Platform displaying a pinned post

Social Network View

Adding Compliance

The head of platform sales was given the specific metric of signing up a Pharma marketing agency or Pharma company as their measure of success for the 2016 year. I worked closely with him on a gap analysis to identify what key features we were missing to sign up our first Pharma client. Together, we identified 3 key features:

  1. Brand Compliance
  2. Guaranteed eyes
  3. Reporting

We agreed that for our first pass, we could handle post promotion and reporting off-line through our current means and the engineering team would provide a tool to create brand compliance.

According to our largest marketing company we worked with, compliance generally meant the need to customize fonts and colors. So our team explored customization options and decided to implement a WYSIWYG rich text editor that would allow them to customize any part of their post outside of the title.

When we updated the WYISWIG editor it did open the door to the Pharma marketing agencies we hoped it would. However, that also opened the door to the Medical legal Review teams that we had not expected. We had signed a contract with our first marketing agency and had them on the platform. As we led them through creating their first post, the asked us:

Okay, now how do I print out how it looks on the member platform so I can send it to legal for review

We had stumbled upon our next issue, all pharma posts must be reviewed by a legal team. We decided to update our preview screen to show the styling of the membership site instead of the client platform.

Previewing a post on the client portal would now style it to match our membership platform

We had satisfied the legal team of our first client. But as we might with a second and third team, they wanted to see how the post displayed on other parts of the platform. They told us about fair balance statements and how they needed their posts to be all or nothing in displaying information. They either needed to only show the title of the post or show the whole post. We created a flagging system that would allow a user to customize the display of their post in post listings. We gave each user three options for display. But we also didn't want to over-load users who didn't care about legal compliance.

We added a switch that revealed 3 options for compliance. They are ordered in order of legal risk, from most to least.

We thought we had solved our fair balance problems by limiting display. But my colleague in sales came back with a complaint from the legal team of our first client. The post had come back from legal and we were missing the post display solution for fair balance. It was one thing to hide post details on preview screens, but once the post is displayed... you need a way to balance positive statements about a drug. I am sure you have seen a TV ad for a drug. At the end of the ad, the narrator very quickly reads 2-3 paragraphs of information at you. That information is called Important Safety Information or ISI. Our client told us that every post that contained a drug name needed an ISI disclaimer.

So we set off to create a solution that would allow ISI to display on any Pharma page without interfering and overtaking the content on the page. We decided to create a sticky box at the bottom of the screen that contained the full 5-6 paragraphs of disclaimer information.

We added a section in the page creation and settings workflow. This allowed users that needed ISI to add it and users that didn't would keep the switch off.

If the ISI section is turned on, a sticky box would attach to the bottom of the page with all ISI information.

Compliance or Value? What is more important?

When I started on this project, I viewed every compliance issue that came up as a delay in providing real value in new features or making the platform more useable. It took me a few enhancements before I finally had the realization Value is meaningless to one of our key users without Compliance. And in a way, to those users, Compliance is the measure of value.

Compliance is a difficult balancing act. Sometimes we handle one side of the equation and forget about the other. But I no longer roll my eyes at compliance requests. I like getting compliance requests now, because it means that those user who need it had found value in our platform and want to use it.

Conceptual Redesign

I spent a lot of time enhancing this platform with features that came out of issues we identified from early adopters trying to gather as much value from the product. As the platform has stabilized, I started thinking about how we could go beyond early adopters and start capturing audiences who expect the platform to be more polished. I started by creating a user flow to understand where users might get lost and then I looked to clean up the UI related to those possible confusion points. I wanted to make the feed a more pleasant and cleaner experience. I focused on things I had noticed as one of the few support members for the product:

  1. A clear understanding of Published and unpublished posts
  2. A cleaner feed with an emphasis on media content
  3. Separating published content from draft content
  4. A larger and more obvious CTA to create new content
  5. An improvement to our breadcrumbs.

I haven't forgotten about my original list of 3 items we needed for paying clients. I have worked with our sales team to identify ways to streamline and eventually automate promoted content. I am still working with sales to do in-depth reporting on user activity while keeping our doctor anonymous.

My redesigned user interface for the client feed