Online Services for Physicians - WebMD
Two of WebMD's online services for physicians include American College of Physicians' Medicine (ACP), a continuously updated digital textbook, and the American College of Surgeons' Surgery Principles and Practices (ACS), a comprehensive, up-to-date compendium of surgical protocols, recommendations, and techniques.
The Challenge
Both ACP and ACS were originally created in a print publishing environment, with most of their data in a Quark format. Both publications are updated monthly and have a large number of contributors (ACP has 140; ACS 175), so the content flows into the respective services from multiple directions. Both publications are also large and complex. ACP has 4,500 pages of text, illustrations, and tables, all linked to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed database. ACS has 2,000 pages and is dynamically linked to Medline, the nation's medical database. Contegra's charge was to transform these publications into Web-based products that are easily searched and used by busy health professionals with life-saving responsibilities.
The Contegra Solution
After conducting an initial needs assessment and laying out an information strategy, Contegra went to work translating the two services' Quark pages into an XML format, which is not only easily searched and manipulated, but can also be re-purposed for other uses (e.g., Some sections of the textbooks are now linked to other disease sections of WebMD). This process is strategically important to WebMD as it seeks additional opportunities to share or sell content and leverage their investment in these two important services.
Contegra also worked with WebMD to create an extensive and intuitive taxonomy or table of contents. We implemented a full-text search engine for both services using dtSearch, customizing this software to enable field searches for a variety of types of information formats, including graphics and references. We also implemented a sophisticated medical thesaurus for both ACP and ACS. As different medical phrases -- like myocardial infarction and heart attack -- may mean the same thing, this expanded the sites' search functionality considerably.
Screenshots of the Contegra solution:
(click the thumbnail to enlarge)
Finally, once the services were up and running, Contegra developed and now staffs a monthly update process for both services, as well as quarterly CD-ROM updates. This is no small task, given the sites' broad range of contributors and their rapid content turnover (e.g., 40% of ACP is revised each year).
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Our long-term partnership with Contegra Systems has been terrific. They are as responsive in their ongoing support and services as they were with our initial product launch.