The University of Pennsylvania Health System

The Client

The University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS) is a complete health care system, from the family doctors to specialist for the most complex healthcare needs. Penn's Health System, which continues to grow, includes the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Pennsylvania Hospital, 8 major community hospitals, and several suburban facilities. The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Pennsylvania Hospital are two of the largest medical facilities in the United States. The Pennsylvania Hospital manages over 201,000 outpatient visits each year. Hundreds of physicians are linked to UPHS via PENNCare, one the largest physician providers in the region.

The Business Challenge

UPHS wanted to provide an online community for staff & patients where the latest information on various health topics such as illness, treatment, and preventive medicine could be shared and where information and data could be provided by multiple content contributors. One of the biggest challenges and goals for UPHS was to enable non-technical staff to contribute content to the online community through a simple, user-friendly template interface. UPHS approached McFadyen Solutions to help them with a cost-effective solution. With the goal to make a big impact in a short amount of time, McFadyen worked quickly to understand the organization's existing technology infrastructure and developed a solution that was cost-effective and leveraged the organization's legacy investments.

The Return on Investment

Within two weeks, UPHS could create, structure, manage, and version various web assets in an effective manner using a user-friendly template interface. Most of the content contribution has been transferred to non-technical business staff, which enables technical staff to focus their time on creating rich graphics on the site and incorporating value-added functionality.

Interwoven's Workflow and OpenDeploy technology reduced many of the manual steps required to create and submit content to the website. The go-live and expiration of content allows the web site to carry the latest health and news articles. In addition to achieving the goal of enabling non-technical business staff to contribute content, UPHS also experienced other improvements:

• Content is displayed on the site in a day, instead of a week.
• Development is focused on enhancements and new functionality, not recurring content updates.
• Specific information is reaching the parties concerned in a timely manner.

The Technology

Interwoven TeamSite 5.01 was primarily used to structure and develop the various assets on the UPHS web site. This was integrated with tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Photoshop to create and publish graphics to the site. The site was rolled out initially for the radiology and cardiology groups with the goal of bringing in other groups at a later stage.

On the production servers, Microsoft IIS web servers were used to serve the content to the end users. The content within UPHS was structured and managed using the Interwoven technology. McFadyen worked with the technology group at UPHS to develop a templating solution for the various pages on UPHS website. Interwoven Team Site Templating was used to create the data capture forms and presentation templates. As part of the solution, Mcfadyen developed several easy to use data capture forms (templates), and presentation templates, which allow the UPHS business users, without any Web or Team Site knowledge, to contribute rich content.

Interwoven Workflow server and Workflow Builder were used to move content through the various development and approval stages. Workflows were configured to move the various assets from the development to approval stages. Finally, Interwoven OpenDeploy was used to move the content from staging to the production web servers. Open deploy scripts were setup and configured to move the content to the various production servers once they were approved and ready to be published. This allowed the business users to effectively expire content with greater ease.