The Challenge
The Centre for Evidence-based Purchasing (formally part of the
NHS Purchasing and Supply Agency, now part of the Department for
Health), provides impartial and objective information about medical
technology to help the NHS make better purchasing decisions. The
Centre wanted to provide an interactive, searchable, online ‘shop
window’ to improve access to their reports for their users.
The Solution
The proposed solution was to develop a bespoke database to house
the reports and integrate the database with their web presence,
enabling interactive interrogation by web users. As the need to
search the reports was a primary objective, the database was also
designed to house comprehensive metadata so that reports could be
easily categorised and tagged to support both simple and advanced
searching.
The solution enabled large numbers of documents to be uploaded,
automatically converted to PDF and indexed, and then searched via
the web.
The solution was implemented as a bespoke development. The web
front-end for the site was also redesigned to accommodate new
branding requirements that emerged during the project with the
final web portal for the Centre being integrated into the
Department of Health website.
The solution includes a web hosting service for the newly built
database at Connect’s purpose built data centre.
The Results
The database houses over 500 reports and has handled over 7,000
requests for documents to date. The resulting system has provided
the Centre with a low maintenance yet more efficient and effective
process for reports publication and has been designed to be
scaleable, to ensure it will continue to support the Centre’s
business needs going forward.