Silverchair has collaborated with the American Medical Association (AMA) via the JAMA Network since 2012, hosting JAMA®, one of the most-cited and highly regarded medical journals in the world, together with JAMA Network Open™ and 10 specialty journals.
In 2019, Silverchair collaborated with the AMA to use the existing functionalities of the JAMA Network on the Silverchair Platform to cross boundaries and develop and launch the AMA Ed Hub™. The AMA Ed Hub online learning platform brings together education from trusted sources, including JAMA Network™, American College of Radiology, Obesity Medicine Association, Society of Hospital Medicine, AMA Journal of Ethics®, AMA STEPS Forward™ and more. The AMA Ed Hub continually expands its offerings with outstanding education from the AMA and other trusted sources. Designed to support lifelong learning, licensure and certification needs, AMA Ed Hub provides high-quality education for physicians and other medical professionals to improve patient care.
The challenge
Education is a key component in the AMA’s mission to promote the betterment of public health, so the development of the AMA Ed Hub—the AMA’s online learning platform—was an important development in their vision to maximize the impact of their content and address the lifelong learning needs of physicians. The AMA Education Center team was originally considering a separate LMS to unify their education offerings, but internal discussions with JAMA’s team revealed that they could leverage the existing platform functionalities of JAMA Network to develop the AMA Ed Hub.
The solution
The AMA was able to leverage investments already made by the organization to build out new content and products. By thinking around department and brand walls, teams were able to collaborate in a flexible, Agile manner, going from inception to budget to development within six months.
In AMA Ed Hub, users can search by topics or product, finding the simplest, easiest way to discover the education that’s relevant to them. In bringing together a diverse set of educational materials – both in terms of a format, in terms of brand, and in terms of business model – the AMA created a scalable and flexible platform that would effectively serve the unique differences of those products, but in a way that was simple, consistent, and easy for the user. This work ensured that the users’ time was spent learning and engaging in the content rather than spending time having to learn, and engage, and navigate disparate and disconnected experiences.
(Hear more about the background and process for the project in July 2020’s Society Street webinar, “Thinking Holistically About Content: Working Together,” with Paul Gee, Vice President of Product Management and Development for the JAMA Network, and Julie Gill, Vice President and General Manager for AMA Ed Hub.)
The process
In terms of the platform architecture, the teams had to create a scalable and flexible framework to showcase the nuance between products, but make it very easy for the user to engage with content. This required streamlined approaches to content loading and display, but because the JAMA team had already done the underlying work to unite a network of journals, they could hit the ground running when creating a network of AMA Ed Hub content. By keeping the content on the same backend architecture for content and customers, they experienced organizational benefits (both in cost and brand highlighting) as well as user and operational benefits.
Download our new report to read more about the unique relationship between the AMA and Silverchair and how their retained team development model enabled the AMA Ed Hub project to move forward quickly, efficiently, and with full flexibility to meet evolving user needs.
“We have gotten tremendous feedback from users. I would say, in our first year of operations, we had double-digit percentage growth in terms of digital engagement with our education. This year, it’s closer to triple-digit increases in terms of sessions, and course completions, and all those things. And yes, it’s a terrific platform, but COVID, and providing education that is helping clinicians deal with that, has been a large part of the engagement that we’ve seen. If anything, the environment that we’re in today, it’s showed us that the foundation that we built with AMA Ed Hub is excellent.” —Julie Gill, Vice President and General Manager for AMA Ed Hub
“At a time when clinicians and researchers demand new and innovative ways to engage with medical research, opinion, and educational content, we’re fortunate to work with Silverchair. Their platform gives our readers the online experience they expect, while offering us the control and flexibility we need to develop products that support our goals and mission.” —Paul Gee, VP of Digital Product Management and Strategy at JAMA Network