Healthcare platform
Building a scalable information architecture, governance model, and CMS foundation for consistent publishing across regulated healthcare markets.
Healthcare platform
Workflow Design
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
7 months
team
2 Engineers, 1 PM, 1 UI Designer, me
platform
Web (Headless CMS)
Medac is a global specialty pharma company. Their digital presence was fragmented, a central corporate site plus decentralised country websites with inconsistent content, no shared CMS, and varying legal requirements for healthcare professional (HCP) access.
I was brought in to rethink the ecosystem: one Global Corporate Website (GCW) complemented by localised country sites, all powered by a headless CMS. The challenge was enabling 15+ distributed teams to create, govern, and publish content independently.
Before designing, I spoke with stakeholders across 15+ countries to understand how they define and prioritise their audiences. The result was that there was no shared model. The UK focuses on HCPs, patients and partners, the Nordics prioritise dealers, France emphasises journalists, and Japan almost exclusively targets HCPs.
Instead of forcing a single structure, I treated this as a design constraint. I developed a flexible information architecture that allows each market to prioritise its audiences within a shared system. I defined a consistent top-level structure (About, Focus Areas, Careers), while allowing each country to shape the content within it. Content is organised by therapeutic areas, reflecting how HCPs search and how teams manage their products. Regulatory requirements like “Report Side Effects” were built in from the start.
With 15+ teams in regulated markets, publishing rights are a compliance issue. I defined five editorial roles, separating content creation from publishing and scoping access by expertise. No one can both create and publish product content: editors draft, legal publishers approve and release. This ensures every piece of pharmaceutical content is reviewed before going live.
With 15+ teams in regulated markets, publishing rights are a compliance issue. I defined five editorial roles, separating content creation from publishing and scoping access by expertise. No one can both create and publish product content: editors draft, legal publishers approve and release. This ensures every piece of pharmaceutical content is reviewed before going live.
I also created a CMS guide for Ibexa that walks through everything from first login to publishing HCP-restricted content. The guide was designed alongside the platform, ensuring every editorial decision had a documented path for content managers to follow.
What I learned
The roles, permissions, and workflow stages I designed aren't visible to end-users, but they determine whether the right content reaches the right audience. For pharma, that's directly tied to patient safety.