Medical Services Plan

January 2013 – April 2013

Note: All work products for this project are protected under NDA. For more details, please contact me directly.

The Project

The Medical Services Plan (MSP) is the province of British Columbia’s publicly-funded healthcare system. With the unveiling of the website for the new BC Services Card, which combines an individual’s driver’s licences and MSP card, BC’s Ministry of Health determined that the MSP website should maintain the same look and feel as the BC Services Card website, which adopted the common gov.bc.ca look and feel . Number 41 Media completed an extensive series of research sessions throughout the province which informed the creation of an adjusted information architecture that focused on integration with gov.bc.ca’s Interwoven content management system while addressing several problems areas identified in the research sessions.

As the lead researcher and information architect on this project, I was responsible for all stages of the project. I designed and facilitated research sessions with MSP beneficiaries, group plan administrators, and healthcare providers in five separate locations throughout BC. Then, I reviewed the raw data from these sessions and developed a robust research findings and recommendations report. Finally, I developed a brand new information architecture that fit with the technical specifications of the chosen content management system and met the needs of all three key user groups.

Research

Before setting out on a province-wide journey to speak with BC citizens, group plan administrators and healthcare professionals, I needed to enrich my understanding of the subject matter and fully grasp the extent of the content, information architecture, interaction design and graphic design of the existing site. In order to do this, I conducted both an environmental scan of the existing site and a comparative analysis of five similar websites.

It was with this knowledge in mind that I developed a research plan and ventured out to numerous communities – large and small; urban and rural  – throughout BC. Using a combination of an intercept approach with BC residents and a pre-scheduled interview approach with group plan administrators and healthcare professionals, I spoke with these stakeholders with regard to their experiences with MSP information and service delivery. The findings of these sessions, along with a series of recommendations and several personas, were captured in a research findings document that informed the remaining component of the project – information architecture.

Information Architecture

In order to best satisfy the needs of three very distinct user groups – MSP beneficiaries, group plan administrators, and healthcare professionals – the IA for the MSP website included three very distinct subsections dealing with the various aspects of delivering the MSP program to each of these groups, along with an About MSP section that dealt with the organizational information for the program area. Within the section for healthcare professionals, further subdivisions were implemented in order to provide practitioner-specific information to all healthcare professionals. Because the Ministry preferred to employ in-house content writers to develop the website’s content, I included only suggestions for content topics and format on a page-by-page basis throughout the information architecture schema document.