Case Study: GraphCMS and PharmaDoctor

Content publishing, which with the previous system took weeks, now takes minutes with GraphCMS. The industry was totally gobsmacked by our speed of deployments.

Judit MoraHead of Production and UX at PharmaDoctor

The Company

PharmaDoctor empowers pharmacists to do more than just dispense prescriptions. Throughout their 20 years in operation, PharmaDoctor has enabled pharmacists to provide clinical service packages to patients from administering vaccinations to treating hay fever to conducting COVID-19 tests for pharmacy teams. Patients can receive treatments for clinical services with more convenience, saving them a trip to the doctors office while still receiving treatment from a trained healthcare professional. Patients using the PharmaDoctor website are able to seek treatment without hassle finding a pharmacy in their area that can provide the service and schedule an appointment.

The Project

In the healthcare industry, websites are not known for being modern and easy to use; however, PharmaDoctor hoped to set a new standard by building a cutting edge website that is easy for both pharmacists and patients to use. With quality and convenience being essential to the PharmaDoctor model, the innovation team was tasked with building a new website that could handle their high volume of traffic and give users a modern user experience. PharmaDoctor needed a fast solution that would give more independence to the content team, speed up development time, and ultimately create a pleasant, modern website for both pharmacies and patients.

After evaluating several headless CMSs, GraphCMS stood out as the right choice for the project. GraphCMS offered a straightforward way to split the content for the patient and pharmacist sites and develop quickly. GraphCMS paired with Angular, AWS Apache and a legacy database system allowed PharmaDoctor to create a website that elevates the user experience tremendously.

Content Publishing used to take 1-2 weeks depending on development. Now, it takes 20 minutes.

Benefits of GraphCMS

The team at PharmaDoctor was impressed by the independence granted to the content team. After the development team created the schema structure, the content team took full ownership of editing and uploading website content, thus enabling them to have more efficient workflows. The user experience for both the development and content team made GraphCMS stand out compared to other headless CMS options.

For the development team, the various types of relations and straightforward features that simply worked the way they are supposed to were essential to the team. The content team benefited greatly from the optimized workflows, the power of the Rich Text Editor, and the ability to manage their SEO through GraphCMS. These workflow optimizations resulted in a much faster content publishing.

With the previous system, it took several weeks to get content published or edited. With GraphCMS, it takes about 20 minutes to publish new content. This optimization is critical for the health industry as pharmacies react to health crises quickly and information on the website must be updated to reflect the current situation, a feature that has been essential during the COVID-19 crisis. In an industry with an often outdated web presence and large amounts of bureaucracy, PharmaDoctor’s ability to be flexible and move quickly sets a new standard for a modern healthcare provider.

Why GraphCMS

• Optimized workflows allow content to be published in minutes rather than weeks
• Relations feature enables complex connections between content types
• Sleek app interface creates a straightforward user experience for content editors and developers alike
• Rich-text Editor and Markdown Editor allow you to create content hassle free and preview the style immediately
• Included free testing playground allowed the team to start working immediately without time consuming onboarding