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Aqueduct Designs Website To Launch London Cancer

Posted by: Aqueduct

Date added: Fri 08 Jun 2012

Creative digital agency, Aqueduct, has designed and built the website for new organisation, London Cancer, a partnership of NHS, academic, charity and cancer specialists dedicated to improving cancer patient outcomes and experience via an Integrated Cancer System.

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Adapting similar models developed in the US and elsewhere, and recognised as an international gold standard for cancer care, the new ICSs will be the first of their kind in the UK and bring together all the cancer care providers across the capital and beyond, using their joint resources and expertise to provide the best possible outcome for every patient.

As well as improving survival rates by up to a thousand lives a year, the systems have pledged to drive improvements in patient experience of care in the capital, which lags behind other parts of the country, and widen the scope of cancer research for the benefit of patients.

The website is being launched in phases. The first phase provides a platform for developing a fully interactive site for patients and members of the public seeking cancer information and local details that are relevant to their needs. It will also be a facility for health professionals (cancer doctors and GPs alike) to access information about services, and to work in partnership with colleagues from across the system. It will be positioned as the up-to-date site for cancer care in north and east London and west Essex, with best practice ambitions both in the UK and globally.

Cancer information provision can be hugely complex. Aqueduct will design the website with a clear hierarchy of information so that visitors to the site can easily follow the pathway and level of detail that they require at any given point for each different type of cancer.

Content for healthcare professionals and for the general public is presented separately and clearly signposted. The ‘For patients’ tab lists the different cancer pathways, which lead to relevant pages. Information includes: the best clinical team for each cancer, local, specialist and personalised care, as well as the latest drugs and treatments. This will be expanded as part of the second phase of development.

At a later stage in the development of the website, information will be personalised for relevance for each stage of the cancer journey, with the aim of making London Cancer the benchmark site internationally for providing cancer information, and facilitating contact between patients and their families with cancer medical professionals, and obtaining real-time feedback on services.

Aqueduct will also look to build additional functionality and interactive elements into the website. To this end, it uses Umbraco V5, an open-source, scalable CMS platform that will support this enhanced interactivity and a predicted large rise in visitor number to the site. London Cancer is one of the first organisations to use the latest version of the Umbraco platform.

Charlotte Williams, director at London Cancer said: “Online support and information about cancer is diverse, and for patients has traditionally been led by charities, as the NHS information is incredibly broad and often hard to navigate. London Cancer aims to bring these elements of support together, presenting information about the entire patient journey in an accessible and interactive format on the website.

“Online is an ideal channel for London Cancer to communicate with people because it can offer information that is completely up to date at all times, and can sign-post to existing resources within local services, where required. This is essential to every audience that comes to us for information, be they patients and their family and friends, or healthcare professionals. We wanted a site that would support our population on what can be an extremely difficult journey. ”

Rob Oubridge, managing director, Aqueduct added: “Cancer affects such a wide spectrum of people that only a website can deliver both the breadth and the highly personalised information that each and every visitor to the site requires. No one case is the same as the next and we relished the opportunity to deliver on London Cancer’s objective to be seen as the foremost cancer information provision site and a benchmark for digital best practice in this space.”

London Cancer serves 3.5 million people in north central and north east London and west Essex. It brings together community, primary, secondary and tertiary care providers in a formal governance structure, which also harnesses the expertise of leading cancer academics and charities.