American Medical Association Case Study


Goals

Founded in 1847, the American Medical Association (AMA), was created with the mission of “promoting the art and science of medicine
and the betterment of public health”. 

AMA’s Physician Innovation Network (PIN), a community-based platform for physicians and entrepreneurs to connect and collaborate,
was creating pain points for the internal team and users: 

  • The platform was progressively more difficult to manage internally.

  • There was no roadmap or plan to guide the product in the foreseeable future.

  • It was hosted on a proprietary platform, making it challenging to update.

AMA decided not to renew their contract with the platform’s provider. They used this as an opportunity to rethink the design
and functionality of PIN to deliver a user-centric experience and improve ease of management on the backend.

Social Network Experience Research

I expanded upon AMA’s already completed stakeholder interviews by analyzing the findings and creating a seamless information architecture,
building out user personas, and creating user journey maps. Our goal was to fully understand the multi-faceted audiences to best design for
each group’s needs. 

We also looked to some of the best user experiences on the market today and pulled in social media engagement best practices.
Our research and major findings directly impacted the visual and UX design of the PIN experience that you see today.


Designing a Healthcare Social Network Experience

We leveraged AMA’s predetermined, robust visual identity for all of the features in the PIN experience. The new platform is an
impactful meeting place for healthcare industry connection, medical innovation, and discussion.

Account holders can now engage with industry colleagues in the easy way that top social media channels offer. We designed
essential engagement features such as: 

  • Share and comment on a post.

  • Direct message an individual or a group.

  • Site-wide discussion on the latest trends.

  • Ability to engage with and post new opportunities, physician insights, jobs, and more to other users on the site.

In addition, we ensured to design a harmonious experience for both desktop and mobile. No matter the device, a user can
easily engage with discussions, messaging, and postings while on the go or in the office.

Development Highlights

We delivered a customized social networking platform to accommodate both AMA’s user and internal needs.

  • Our engineers built PIN in Drupal’s community engagement platform known as Open Social.

  • Knowing that AMA’s roadmap flexibility was of utmost importance we created PIN in such a way that future technical iterations
    could easily be implemented.

  • We focused on when and where users would interact with the platform the most and insured that all interactions are
    seamless across both mobile and desktop.

Outcomes and Awards

  • In the first 3 months since launch, over 3,000 users have interacted with the PIN platform.

  • Web Excellence Award - Apps & Mobile - Health & Wellness