NPS Medicinewise
Project Description
NPS provides free, independent, evidence-based info on medicines, health conditions & medical tests for health professionals & consumers. Over 7 million Australians are aware of NPS MedicineWise, and the website had 13 million visits in the 2016-17 financial year.
Red Ant were engaged by NPS in 2015 as part of their wider digital transformation. Our task was to automate the process of ingesting data into the system, allowing the process to scale, as well fast tracking turnaround time on content updates to minutes rather than days.
The NPS site relies on several sources of data including the Australian Prescriber journal, the Medicine Finder, and MedicineInsight data.
The whole NPS system relies on good data. Our challenge was to develop a process to pull this information in, index and contextualise, and then have it appear as search result pages like this one.
A good CMS can help with some parts of this, and a good process workflow can help enhance data quality. We designed a system that could efficiently ingest large volumes of very complex medical data and present it back in multiple locations to different user types. We designed a user friendly and highly accessible website experience, with a range of tools to enable different types of users to interrogate the data based on their needs.
Behind the scenes, the project included initiatives that would save money and increase efficiency for NPS administrators. One of the key requirements for NPS was for multiple members of the NPS team to be able to update content at the same time. We implemented a Headless CMS to provide the level of flexibility required to let multiple content editors update content at the same time, avoiding rigid publishing workflows and bottlenecks.

Anyway, back to the NPS project. The next phase of the project was to update the rest of quite a large existing site to also use Scrivito. This meant designing and building new templates, as well as the content team updating literally thousands of pages of content. One of the nice features is the ability to create working copies. This means anyone on a team can start working on a version of the site, and then merge their changes when they are done without overwriting other people’s changes.

Finally, all of this needed to get set up in a resilient manner. Part of the site relied on automated feeds, so we needed to make sure if there was an error in the feed, it would get automatically healed (in the case of a missing image or tag) or reported to a human. We used Automated Tests to make sure the code was working correctly, and finally deployed to a Kubernetes cluster on Amazon AWS.
Update: the NPS site was redeveloped in 2019 by another team with different technology.
Project Detail
- Client: NPS Medicinewise
- Date: 2015-17
- Project URL: https://www.nps.org.au/
- Key technology: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ruby on Rails, Scrivito CMS, PostgreSQL, WAVE visually impaired testing tool as part of CI build chain,