Elemeno Health Structured Content Design & Development
I helped the micro-learning education startup Elemeno Health design, develop, and release a structured content solution to more effectively create, publish, and reuse thousands of hyperlocal, clinician-focused resources at patient care locations across the country. Elemeno's content now works harder and lasts longer, allowing it to scale more effectively over time and deliver greater value to Elemeno customers.
Project Activities
- Large-scale content audit & structural assessment
- Content production process mapping
- Domain modeling
- Schema and content model creation
- Taxonomy adoption and creation
- Content model development in Sanity CMS
- Structured content authoring training & support
Project Goal
Evolve Content Production to Promote Quality and Reuse at Scale
Elemeno Health produces, publishes, and maintains location-specific content based on client source documents for nurses, doctors, and other point-of-care specialists. These quick-access resources help providers decrease variations in care and stay up to date with changes in procedures and policies.
Prior to this project, Elemeno was using a home-grown content management system (CMS) based on markdown authoring and manually maintained links between related resources to meet its content authoring needs. As Elemeno grew and added clients and features, this system made it increasingly difficult to produce and maintain quality content. The home-grown system also had few affordances for connecting content, reusing content across contexts, or repurposing content for new clients with similar needs.
This project focused on providing the processes and technology needed to allow Elemeno to more efficiently create and connect content, and to allow it to repurpose and reuse content already created. It also created a structurally sound content-as-data foundation that allows Elemeno to scale and iterate its models as business and user needs change and evolve.
Project Approach
Collaborative, Cross-Functional Evolution of Elemeno’s Content Ecosystem
In order to ensure that Elemeno Health's revised content production process and tooling were tailored to Elemeno's unique position in the healthcare education landscape, our project plan needed to be collaborative, systemic, hands-on, and iterative. This meant researching, developing, and iterating multiple models in parallel, and testing and revising elements across the content ecosystem to find the right combination of "guardrails" and flexibility to meet business, producer, and end-user needs.
Project tasks included:
- Qualitative and quantitative content auditing and assessment
- Stakeholder and project team member alignment, facilitated through iterative interviews, research, discovery activities, and collaborative design principle formulation
- Collaborative domain definition and modeling focused on creating a shared understanding of Elemeno's unique value proposition and providing a grounding for subsequent structured content modeling activities
- Content production workflow process mapping and analysis
- Content type design and development in Sanity CMS, including schema authoring and custom action and custom input component design and development (React & Typescript)
- Taxonomy requirement specification and implementation, including the vetting and selection of existing vocabularies (SNOMED-CT) and custom taxonomy design and term selection
- Sequenced training activities designed to iteratively (and gently) bring content creators and consumers into the new composable content workflow
Project Outcome
Structured Content Authoring that Supports Composability, Connection, and Reuse
Elemeno needed to create and connect content more effectively and, crucially, to efficiently repurpose and reuse existing content. This project delivered a structured, composable approach to content production that balances the enforcement and validation of content authoring best practices with the flexibility and adaptiveness needed to accommodate the range of client resources the Elemeno platform supports.
Elemeno's new CMS accomplishes this by:
- Explicitly defining the structural elements that constitute individual resources
- Using custom and industry standard vocabularies (taxonomies) to constrain field values for greater consistency and uniformity
- Structuring and communicating the relationships between resource elements in both human and machine-readable ways
The resulting system helps producers create higher quality, more consistent content because they don't need to "reinvent" resource structure and strategy each time they start a new resource. Metadata fields likewise offer guidance and direct access to controlled terms and, where appropriate, client-based default values.
Systematic and controlled resource metadata now allows Elemeno to connect content dynamically and, where allowed, re-use it across client applications. Provenance metadata likewise maintains a rich "information genealogy" of resource use that provides Elemeno with metadata-driven content intelligence, enabling them to act as a trusted, informed partner in the development and growth of their customers’ libraries.
