My Role and Project Background
The UnitedHealth Premium program assesses physicians for quality of care and cost efficiency and recognizes those physicians who meet quality and cost efficiency guidelines. The end goal of the project was to help patients choose their physicians as well as to assist physicians when referring patients to other physicians. I was brought on to the project to explain the methodology through words and images in print and online. The initial assignment was to develop user guides and training materials, but it expanded to grew to include design of wireframes and layouts for an online portal, and eventually required me to solve for how publish customized views and specific content to different audiences.
Methods and Strategy
Getting the job done was relatively straightforward: work with stakeholders to figure out what was required of the content and images, develop endless drafts and versions of content and images, then publish and post for review and revisions., while at the same time, developing wireframes to define what the portal would look like. Wireframes for the four primary pages are shown here.
I spent a lot of time in the offices of the two project owners who had established the program. I also immersed myself in statistics in order to better understand and better explain the measurements and the evaluation methods being used. There were many deliverables to produce and for many different audiences. The primary (source) deliverable was the Detailed Methodology, but there were many other documents including FAQs and portal administration documentation.
We used the chi-square test to compare the observed results with the expected results for the quality assessment.
Solutions and Delivery
Wireframes and documentation were easy compared to the challenge of providing publishing customized content. Where once there were five primary documents that might all include snippets of common content to be copied and pasted from one to the other and to letter or the poral, we suddenly had five primary documents for each client and would have to maintain updates not only across the original source library, but also make client-specific updates across the modified five client documents. We also had to plan for the future when the online PDF content would be published to HTML and both channels would have to be styled according to brand and have the identical content.
My recommendation was to manage all source content directly in a content management application (Vignette or Madcap Flare) because it was the most efficient, but this was not viable because we lacked a resource on the team who could do this work.
This left us with authoring in Word, converting documents to PDF, and having the PDF content posted online through Vignette. For the content that was going to be posted to HTML on the portal, the team would be required to copy the content from their source Word documents and send this to the Vignette team to be posted online. It wasn’t the most efficient solution, and it meant that the team needed to figure out how to manage their edits and deliverables without the automation of a single source or a CMS, but it gave the team control over customer updates and didn’t require them to change their internal documentation processes. The only thing they had to accommodate was to coordinate their development schedules with the Vignette team so that content was done in time to be handed off and posted to the portal. It was not the most elegant outcome, but it was a win nonetheless and it set them up with a existing team and process to get their content moved from Word documents to HTML and posted online.