EIT Health is a network of best-in-class health innovators, backed by the EU. Established in 2015, they are one of several Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) established by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) – an agency of the European Commission.
Who is EIT Health?
EIT Health facilitates innovation to improve the health of European citizens.
Empowering a network of 150 partner organisations, EIT Health fosters collaboration and innovation across European borders between leaders in business, research and education; with funding, expertise, and access to the market, so that breakthrough ideas can be implemented rapidly.
The EIT Health network is composed of health innovators who create outside-the-box solutions. They deliver meaningful new products and services and support ground-breaking ideas. These efforts help create new businesses and jobs, while always putting the health and wellbeing of citizens front and centre.
EIT Health's goals are to improve health education, promote healthy lifestyles, and help health professionals to grow. They share insights and disseminate knowledge through citizen engagement activities, workshops, and skills development programmes.
EIT Health were looking for an economic operator with experience developing an Acquia/Drupal based Community Platform. They required a complete redesign and relaunch of their existing community platform in order to improve engagement, stimulate collaboration and innovation between their network.
What problem was the client facing?
In 2019 an evaluation by EIT Health and a Communication Agency identified the need for a complete redesign and relaunch of the existing online community platform, to increase engagement and usability with improved user experience.
“Connections” was the existing online portal which aimed to facilitate EIT Health’s network ability to innovate together. It was an interactive area for partners to access a vital part of their membership, enabling them to: discuss future projects, exchange learnings and insights, and be a part of the vibrant EIT Health network. It was also the space to find vital partnership and Business Plan process information (legal, administrative, financial) and other useful guidance content.
Research conducted by the agency highlighted usability challenges and missing search features as barriers to use. This resulted in demotivated users and low usage by the primary audience, the EIT Health partner network. This led to the decision to relaunch the entire platform.
The vision was to make the platform a destination of choice as well as necessity, including features and content which encouraged platform usage. They wanted a solution that would provide an interactive exchange and encourage collaboration.
The goal was to design and implement a platform that was easy to use, and easy for users to find the right information in order for partners to fulfill their and EIT Health’s primary aim of being part of an innovation community. This is where 1xINTERNET became involved helping to develop a community platform with dynamic functionality that users could fully engage with.
How could we help?
1xINTERNET had to respond to the user requirements as identified by the communication agency in order to implement a complete UX redesign of the community platform.
The Open Social distribution based on Drupal was used to implement a powerful community platform that provides users with exciting features to share, contribute and collaborate. The platform provides a private area for members to login, create profiles, groups, discussion topics and to share content and resources.
1xINTERNET developed a dynamic system in which community members can post about their needs and interests, find information about upcoming projects and actively communicate and collaborate with other partners. Advanced search analytics and tagging was used to enable dynamic content, analysis and insights.
We designed a UX experience that enabled the network partners to access content, engage with other members, find information about upcoming events and stay connected.
Why was Drupal a good fit for this project?
EIT Health decided they needed a bespoke Acquia based Community Platform having conducted an extensive research exercise with a Communications agency. They concluded that implementation of the Drupal Open Social distribution Community Engagement Platform was the perfect choice for their needs in creating a dynamic knowledge sharing community.
Main features of the project
Community platform built using the Drupal Open Social distribution with dynamic features and functionality.
- Advanced tagging functionality for resource sharing and advanced search analytics enabling user segmentation and dynamic content.
- Message and chat function to spark conversation and communication across the network.
- Event listings with search functionality.
- Community member and partner profiles with matchmaking and networking to facilitate collaboration.
- Enable connections through the sharing of news articles and resources making it easy to contribute and share information; filtering results by interest, expertise and organisations.
- Community Stories - an area where partners can share success stories with the broader EIT Health network.
- Groups workspaces - groups have their own workspaces and dynamic content areas. Members can join existing groups or create groups to share files or collaborate around specific topics.
Hosting
EIT Health is using Acquia Cloud, a Drupal-tuned application lifecycle management suite with a complete infrastructure to support Drupal deployment workflow processes from development and staging through to production.
