Making a medical association's learning content more findable and discoverable

Challenge

The American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) sought to help its members navigate AGA University, its hub for continuing education courses. Online offerings had been streamlined following the COVID-19 pandemic with the resurgence of in-person education. However, AGA hadn’t refitted its learning management system (LMS) taxonomy and lacked a consistent strategy for tagging the courses that had made the cut.

Some members reported too few results, as some terms had lapsed into obsolescence and led to navigational dead ends. Others reported too many results, suggesting staff may have overtagged content in a war for visual real estate, waged in the absence of a unified holistic vision.

Approach

DISCOVERY

To complement an in-depth review of existing vocabularies, system capabilities, strategic plans, and other core artifacts, we interviewed staff across the association and worked closely with a core team of representatives from key departments to draw up a strategic blueprint to revamp the LMS taxonomy.

TAXONOMY DEVELOPMENT

With the strategy approved, we pooled candidate concepts from various sources and weighed them against the association’s current educational offerings, emerging topics expected to be covered in upcoming courses, and other concerns raised in interviews such as sensitivity in describing patient and provider groups.

We aimed to allow multiple points of access to content for different member types with different information needs, while ensuring that each term was supported by a body of content.

USER TESTING & TRAINING

We workshopped a draft taxonomy with several AGA members to ensure semantic accuracy and duly sensitive language. A card sort engaged more staff in the effort and highlighted what became a core resource in tagging training. A tree test with members validated the utility of the revamped taxonomy. Finally, an interactive session trained staff in taxonomy and tagging best practices.

GOVERNANCE

Given the rapid advancement of knowledge in gastroenterology, coupled with the accelerated pace of change in healthcare and health systems, we advised AGA to develop regular and robust governance and maintenance processes to keep its revamped LMS taxonomy fitted to its changing content. We customized our support for governance to AGA’s expressed needs and interests.

Solution

We partnered with AGA to bring its taxonomy for its continuing education courses up to date and help its 15,000+ members zero in on educational content relevant to their needs. The revamped taxonomy we created together drew on not only multiple internal controlled vocabularies and external standards, but also more than 50 people who contributed their insights through interviews, workshops, and user testing.

See the taxonomy we developed together in action here.

Aligned LMS taxonomy with updated content & offered tools to keep it aligned
Enhanced quality and consistency of learning content tagging by staff
Improved findability and discoverability of learning content for member-users

work

Making a medical association’s learning content more findable and discoverable

Challenge

Approach

Solution