Automated Acceleration
The Problem
A digital publisher in the medical industry, approached us with a request to automate a critical process for their website. The process was vital to their platform’s success but had become a significant operational bottleneck. They recognized that while the process was essential, it wasn’t particularly skill intensive and could potentially be automated. Their assessment proved correct – the process was perfect for automation.
What We Did
We implemented a series of iterative custom web development projects. Each project phase concluded with a functional component that the client could immediately integrate into their operations. This approach:
- Minimized risk for both parties
- Ensured alignment between our understanding and UroToday’s needs
- Provided value at each step
- Maintained momentum by focusing on discrete components
The final tools we developed:
- Connected the website to the National Library of Medicine’s research database
- Ran daily queries that created content for the website
- Initiated new content campaigns by extracting author data from the research database and automating outreach for follow-on collaboration opportunities
- Created curated test information for patients and doctors in specialty medicine
Result
- Work time was reduced from 8 hours each day to 40 minutes
- Annual salary savings: $110,000 with $330,000 savings over the first three years of operation
- Return on investment achieved within three months of implementation
- Increased efficiency allowed for significant process scaling which contributed to their website’s traffic expanding by 1000%
The automation dramatically improved operational efficiency, leading to both substantial website traffic growth and significant cost savings for the publisher.
Another Need
But It didn’t end there:
A few years later, the publisher approached us again and said, “We really love what you built for us. We’re wondering if you could figure out how to do something similar for us, but in a slightly different situation.”
One of the ways that they created content was by covering the major conferences that occur in Urology. They sent medical writers to each session to capture the content of the new research that was being presented and would post it on their website.
At the time though, writers were creating content in Word documents because that was the limit of their technical knowledge. This presented another bottleneck, because all content had to be processed by their editors from word documents into articles suitable for posting on their platform.
The value of the content was in how timely it was to non-attendees, but it often took several days after the conference had concluded before their team could post everything on the website.
What We Did
To address this, rather than trying to train writers on how to submit web content via the platform, we built a custom plugin that did two simple things:
- It enabled content administrators to create a link, specific to a conference being covered, and share that link with their writers
- When writers visited the link all they saw was a blank page with an upload dialog box on it
Writers continued to create articles in Microsoft Word as they moved from session to session. But rather than saving it in a shared Drop Box, they would simply drag and drop their saved Word document onto the upload dialog.
From there, our plugin automatically converted it into an article on the website, in the correct category, and in draft form. All the content team had to do was review the article and hit “publish.”
Result
The result of this innovation was that the publisher was able to provide nearly live coverage of what was being presented at conferences on their website. This enabled them to magnify the impact of conference coverage because they were always “first to market,” for each event, making them the number one news source for non-attendees.
