Medicines awareness service

Owner

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) owns the Medicines Awareness Service (MAS). It’s licensed under the MIT licence, which allows for free use of the service’s code for modification, distribution, private use and commercial use.

Background 

The Medicines Awareness Service is a daily or weekly email newsletter. It provides links to evidence based information relating to medicine and prescribing to help keep busy care providers up-to-date. Around 20,000 subscribers receive these curated lists.

Situation

The MAS team needed to rebuild their legacy newsletter service to rectify specific problems around technology, supportability and security. The broad user need (keeping busy people up to date) remained the same, but specific needs around timeliness, format of notifications, and longer term information storage were less clear.

Aspiration

• rebuild an existing digital service and migrate from a legacy platform.
• make a supportable, robust platform using modern technology and tooling.

Solution and impact

MAS uses the proprietary Mailchimp tool for managing subscribers and sending updates to them, but the “backend” (the way that information is authored, stored, and delivered) is now open source, cloud based, and automated. A modular approach has allowed for individual functions to be developed in-house and plugged together to manage and curate content from different sources, also creating a website for users to refer back to as they see fit.

This project used the open source approach of “coding in the open” (rather than building in a closed way), allowing people to easily contribute to it from across NICE. Ian, part of the MAS team says that it’s important to share development experiences with the NHS and wider government:

Functionality

The MAS has been serving more than 20,000 subscribers for the last two years. It includes:

• An open source CMS (keystone) with an easy to use interface, through which staff at the Specialist Pharmacy Service can enter content.
• Serverless cloud functions provided by AWS to generate daily and weekly emails.
• Static web hosting
• Integration into the Mailchimp tool.

Capabilities

• Allows individuals to keep up to date with topic-specific news articles from around the web
• Updates a legacy system in an open and collaborative way
• Inclusive of information taxonomies from the standard TopBraid, allowing for integration into NICE’s other services.

Scope

Fundamentally, MAS is an email subscription service: with open source licensing it has the potential to be reused and adapted for different content across a mixture of audiences.

Key learning points

• Communication is key. It’s a good idea to bring users on the journey of what will change and when these changes will happen. People can be nervous of sudden changes.
• It’s important to keep it simple. A consistent system removed the need to preview and check content, helping editors to focus on the content itself.
• Have a strategy for migration and know what to lose - the team made a deliberate and clean break from years of ‘legacy’ content.
• Use modular approaches to enable the right tools for the right tasks. Keystone CMS was easy to configure to our needs but a proprietary platform (Mailchimp) was right for sending emails and managing email templates.
• Using open source allowed for open collaboration, and opens up the ability for reuse in the future.

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Page last updated: September 2022