Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

The Client

Since its founding in 1947, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in Boston, Massachusetts, has been committed to providing the best treatment available today to adults and children with cancer, while also developing tomorrow's cures through cutting-edge research. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is a principal teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, a federally designated Center for AIDS Research, and a founding member of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, a federally designated comprehensive cancer center. Dana-Farber also maintains affiliations with several schools of nursing in the Boston area.

The Situation

DFCI delivers innovative oncology care, offering innovative approaches rooted in research. As a result, the standard clinically approved patient education content that most organizations use is insufficient for DFCI’s patients. The Institute has a team of patient education experts who coordinate, manage, and review unique content for DFCI patients, whether provided as a part of a clinical interaction or available on the website. DFCI wanted a clear "gold standard" to provide to patients that would always represent the latest reviewed and clinically-approved content. 

The Challenge

As a part of a larger initiative to standardize all of DFCI’s content management needs on Acquia, the Institute needed to replace its largely manual system — one that kept track of all documents in a simple project management tool and a network shared drive of PDF files — with a centralized, automated tool. DCFI needed a system that would need to be able to easily link to content rather than having clinicians save copies of PDFs to their local computers. 

This content also needed to be delivered in multiple locations and multiple formats. For example, in some cases, the content needed to be delivered as HTML within a web experience or signage, as a printed document at the point of care, or as a PDF within the electronic medical record (EMR). The content's language needed to be consistent in all modalities, but the layout would need to change to fit the user's context. But the decentralized nature of the previous content processes made reviewing and translating documents a challenge to manage and keep current and consistent across modalities.

The Solution

DFCI partnered with Perficient, and the teams kicked off the project by defining an automated workflow and process that would work for all of the education content. The workflow allows physicians to work in whatever way is best for them — some physicians are comfortable working within a system, but others prefer to provide drafts outside the system and rely on the patient education staff to manage the in-system process.

Leveraging the workflow in Drupal and the new features available in CKEditor 5, Perficient defined a flexible set of content types that represented the different types of patient education content. CKEditor 5’s additional features around simultaneous editing, redlining, and commenting helped ensure multiple content authors could review and provide feedback within the process on a centralized platform.

Drupal views and reports helped administrators stay abreast of content review needs, ensuring new content moves through the system and existing content is reviewed appropriately. Through DFCI’s preferred translation provider, LanguageLine, content authors can manage content translation as a part of the overall workflow, tracking it alongside the original content. 

DFCI can easily create content in different formats. Utilizing community modules available for Drupal, DFCI can easily generate branded PDFs and upload them into Acquia DAM. Acquia DAM ensures that the link for the PDF is consistent wherever it is used and supports anonymous analytics on the usage of content wherever it is linked.

Leveraging both the HTML content and the branded PDF content available in the DAM system, Acquia CMS headless APIs ensured that the content was displayed and searchable wherever needed. A single-page app (SPA) integrated into the intranet exposes all of the content to DFCI employees — and through integration with Xealth, the content can be delivered into the Epic medical record for a physician to attach as a part of the wrap-up event. 

The Results

Dana-Farber clinicians now have an easier way to collaborate and review patient education content. DFCI can now ensure that the linked content is the gold standard that represents the most clinically accurate content for the patient at the time. And DFCI administrators have a tool to help support their content creation and review process, reducing the time it takes to author, review, and translate content.