Merck & Co. provides quality healthcare information

With an ambitious plan to make high quality, trustworthy healthcare information available to three billion healthcare professionals and patients worldwide by 2020, Merck needed to ensure its medical manuals website was fit for the future. To do that, it needed to update its user experience and its frontend and backend systems, using the right content management system and the best possible digital agency partner.

With the old system, the publishing cycle was too long, and there was a risk that medical information would change by the time the update was eventually published. In addition, wanted to create a more accessible user experience, for end users accessing the content on different continents, in different languages and on a variety of devices, and for the physicians publishing the updates.

One of the primary technical challenges was successfully integrating with an existing content management system used for the editorial process. The Manuals’ Sitecore solution needed to read specialist medical content from a Vasont CMS, which acts as the backbone of the content for all editions of the manual, both print and digital.

One of most important features, Sitecore’s advanced multi-language support, provides a better experience for both doctors and patients. Doctors can now provide multiple languages of the same article in an instant. For example, if a doctor in the US needs to give a Spanish-speaking patient a guide to treating a gall bladder infection, Sitecore makes it easy: the doctor can find the article in English and then select the Spanish version to print.