User:Vitruvianman2003/sandbox

Medthority is a medical information website intended for healthcare professionals and published by United Kingdom based digital publisher EPG Health.

Medthority is a decision support tool for doctors and other healthcare professionals, and contains a range of content and content types, much of which is arranged around 11 major medical specialty areas. The websites content includes prescription drug information, guidelines for treatment, summary clinical trial outcomes, journal article extracts, and self-directed accredited and non accredited learning activities, which are described as Learning Zones.

The website contains >100,000 dynamic pages of content, much of which is either approved by various national and international medical societies, published by regulatory authorities, or peer reviewed. Prescription medicine information is sourced and published through a relationship with the Electronic Medicines Compendium (Datapharm).

The Medthority website is a rework of epgonline.org (and previously europeanprescriberguide.com), both websites having performed a similar purpose with the same intended audience. The europeanprescriberguide.com website had started life in 2001 through the development of a software application, later issued free to doctors in partnership with the European Medical Association. The software contained prescription drug information in a range of languages and localised versions, e.g German prescription drug information for German users, along with a series of industry sponsored 'Knowledge Centres', each intended to assist doctors with current thinking in terms of patient management, treatment, and or prescribing decision.

The software launched in 2002 and was both PC and Mac OS compatible, it's functionality facilitated regular updates/ content refresh sent to each software client, updates included changes to prescription product marketing authorisation, or the marketing authorisation of new treatments, dosage changes, or revised approvals including new authorised uses for existing prescription only medicines.

Novel in its time, this software 'update' was achieved via an automated process, with frequency of update controlled by the end user. During the periodic software update - a packet of data was passed back from the software client to a central server. The data packet contained a record of user behaviour within the software, and specifically, which prescription treatments/ knowledge centres were frequented by that user. This information was matched by the publisher with the specialty type of the user, for example an Oncologist or General Practitioner, and so provided the publisher and its customers with an early form of user analytics. This data could then be used for product improvement or identifying trends for content improvement.

As internet access improved for doctors in the early 2000s, and in particular access available at medical practices, the European Prescriber Guide software application migrated to a web form in 2003, with the publisher using a coldfusion based web architecture and/ coding environment and a small team of developers to 'self build' the web version, which was available at the URL europeanprescriberguide.com. The publisher continued to maintain support for the software version until 2010.

The europeanprescriberguide.com website went through various iterative changes and updates, including being re-named as epgonline.org in 2004. Other updates included the addition of localised language versions in 2007, and the addition of news, guidelines and clinical trial outcomes in 2010.

In 2013 work began to re-develop the then nearly 10 year old epgonline.org website in the Presdide Platform, an open source application development environment based on the Lucee language (compatible with ColdFusion mark up, or CFML). The revised website came with a re-thought UX design and inclusion of a personalised user dashboard, it launched at eyeforpharma Barcelona in 2016 under the tag line 'its getting personal'.

In 2017 EPG Health set out to re-think epgonline.org and in particular it's ability to service the websites development needs through the underlying development environment, and how this in turn could be best used to service the evolving needs of healthcare professionals in what was then considered the period of 'Health 2.0'.

In 2018 and as part of the exercise to 're-think' the website, market research was commissioned and conducted with the support of Redweb, an award winning digital agency based in Bournemouth in the United Kingdom. Through the research, healthcare professionals and EPG Health pharmaceutical customers were consulted on their preferences for an improved platform, service and user experience. In parallel, EPG Health examined the suitability of the CFML or related coding environments for ongoing development, which, by then, had been in use for 13 years.

The research was shared with multiple stakeholder groups via the EPG Health website.

The research revealed two key findings. First, that the demands of users for improved online experience would required a significant amount of in-house re-development and re-skill, and second, that the name 'epgonline.org' had low intuitive resonance with users - many of whom were unfamiliar with it's origin (European Prescriber Guide), or were part of a global ex-European audience.

IN mid 2019 it was decided the revised platform would be re-developed in a PaaS web environment, and would launch under a new name 'Medthority'. After a review of various alternate PaaS providers, a decision was taken to select Episerver as PaaS development partner with work commencing in December 2019.

In April 2020 Medthority went live, and the legacy epgonline.org website was re-directed to the new domain.