[TYPO3-UG US] Case Study: Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center

[Reuven Cohen [At work]]

-- For Review -- Need some input

CASE STUDY:
Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center

The Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC) was launched in 2000 with a 
five-year grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and is a 
designated comprehensive cancer center. It is now the largest, most 
comprehensive cancer center in the world, consisting of over 800 senior 
scientists from clinical, basic, and population research. DF/HCC is a 
geographically-distributed cancer research consortium whose members are 
affiliated with seven institutions from the Harvard medical and public 
health community: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham And Women's 
Hospital, Children's Hospital Boston, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard 
Medical School, Harvard School Of Public Health, and Massachusetts General 
Hospital.

DF/HCC was committed to transforming its existing web sites (internet and 
intranet) into one "pulse of the Center," a place where researchers can 
share information with each other and with the public. One of the prime 
Center objectives is to make it possible for individual investigators to 
work in interactive, trans-institutional groups dedicated to a given disease 
or cancer-related scientific discipline and, thereby, to nurture each other's 
scientific effort.


Research at DF/HCC is carried out in 17 disease-site and discipline-based 
Research Programs that cross both institutional and scientific boundaries. A 
major attraction to DF/HCC for Harvard's cancer researchers is the access 
they gain to 21 service laboratories. These "core" laboratories are 
centralized facilities, each a center of excellence that permits researchers 
to perform technologically challenging experiments or undertake population 
studies at a lower cost. Communication regarding these services is critical 
to utilizing them to their fullest capacity.


Scientists are tightly affiliated with their primary institution and work 
collaboratively through DF/HCC to further research. These researchers had to 
be convinced that the web site provided immediate value and improved their 
ability to collaborate with one another on a daily basis. The site needed a 
new design and architecture, for sharing information and facilitating access 
to Center programs and services.


The capability for publishing content needed to be distributed to the 
researchers in order to keep the content compelling and current. From a 
technological perspective, a Content Management System that could manage 
distributed authoring from a hierarchy of contributors was a critical 
success factor. As a virtual organization, DF/HCC has a small IT staff, and 
only a single staff member tasked with updating Web content. The CMS had to 
be easy to use and encourage continuous updating in order to keep the 
content up-to-date. Additionally, the technical infrastructure had to enable 
multiple levels of access and security because each member institution has 
its own IT departments and security firewalls.


DF/HCC selected an open source Content Management System (TYPO3) that would 
enable content providers to publish and update their own content. Because 
the various constituencies had different requirements for information as 
well as varying abilities to update content, the areas of security, content 
access levels, editorial guidelines and other workflow capabilities were 
critical to the site design and architecture.


NCI Cancer Center Support Grant Funding for Center Communications


For the NCI grant, communication was identified as the direct response to 
the needs identified by senior leadership, the members and external 
reviewers. The website was targeted as the most appropriate approach to 
improved communication, and communication administration has focused on this 
solution to the challenges of a large, complex program. The June '05 NCI 
site visit reviewed the web developments at the time and confirmed the 
feasibility of attaining the proposed new objectives and therefore, 
contributed to funding for Center Communication.


Advance translational cancer research through collaboration


The site provides the platform for connectivity in a distributed cancer 
research environment. The goal is to increase the rate of translational 
research across the three scientific disciplines of clinical, basic, and 
population research. A major objective of the site is to educate the various 
constituencies on resources available across institutions. The site reflects 
ways that people come together and collaborate through an information 
architecture that enables access to relevant information and invites 
discussion.


The DF/HCC web site also provides a real online presence for Specialized 
Programs of Research Excellence (SPOREs), cross-institutional research 
groups built around specific problems or diseases tied to grants. These 
seven SPORES now have the ability to publish minutes, meeting times and 
locations, news, up-to-date member information and set up collaboration 
space.


Visibility into subsidized services available to members


Nineteen Cores have been set up within DF/HCC for services and equipment 
that are too expensive, difficult or cutting-edge to replicate in each 
institution. Utilizing these services to their fullest capacity is a major 
objective.


Breaking down institutional walls, the site provides service descriptions, 
terms involved (cost, time) and the specifics on how to access these 
services. The site provides the information architecture for users to find 
these services, and the technology and organizational architecture for 
providers of these services to update the content.


Member institutions may have duplicate equipment, services and staff with 
underutilized capacity. Providing easy access to these Core service groups 
across institutional boundaries has the potential to help eliminate 
duplication of effort and lead to major cost savings.


Mentoring the next generation of leadership


The new site provides the ability to equalize the energy of the center and 
engage and involve junior faculty. Current leadership of the Center is rich 
with senior faculty. The new site will post events to a Center calendar, 
news of collaborative successes, funding available to junior investigators 
and information about seed projects in need of additional resources. The 
content provides a vehicle to reach a population that is vital to the future 
of the center and advances in cancer research.


Providing visibility to the publi


The CMS provides the capability to build a central repository of Center 
resources, while providing needed content to keep the various public 
constituencies informed. This architecture will provide greater visibility 
to the media, the general population, and researchers in other cancer 
centers -- particularly important in an era of resource uncertainty.


Primary user groups


There are three primary user groups - Internal Consumers (Intranet), 
External Consumers (Internet) and Content Producers - that make up the 
primary audiences. These three user groups break down into sub-groups with 
many unique content/function needs and perspectives.


Internal Consumers (Intranet) consist of DF/HCC members who are the 800+ 
DF/HCC principal investigators. These members are major researchers in 
basic, clinical and population science. Additional internal consumers are 
the post-doctorate researchers and clinicians (nurses, physicians, research 
pharmacists).


External Consumers are an extremely varied group. Community-related: public 
health policy makers, legislative staff, and community groups. Care-related: 
patients, family, physicians. Research-related: pharmaceutical/biotech 
companies, researchers, Harvard-affiliated organizations, cancer centers. 
Donors: foundations, government entities, philanthropists, 
pharmaceutical/biotech companies. Government-related: National Cancer 
Institute, other government entities, regulators. Additional external 
consumers include the media and the public.


Content Producers: DF/HCC administrators, Core, SPORE and program leaders 
are the publishers and editors of the site.


The site usage is expected to double over the next twelve months.


The CMS project started in November 2004 and is now being rolled out to the 
content producers with launch planned for November 2005. The design and 
development phase took nine months to complete. The project was a 
coordinated development effort with the DF/HCC technical team and Enomaly. 
Enomaly performed an extensive development analysis and delivered a function 
CMS infrastructure into the CMS. DF/HCC provided three developers to 
implement and customize the TYPO3 modules.


During the next several phases of the project, Enomaly customized the TYPO3 
modules in order to address the deep access hierarchy and the authoring 
system for the various content contributors across the membership.


Phase Two consisted of installations of key hardware, software and server 
modules and the configuration of the web server, databases (local & remote), 
security, load balancing and core TYPO3 system. This stage included 
implementing templates, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and java scripts into 
the TYPO3 architecture. The team began development of custom system 
extensions, workflows, access hierarchy and technical solutions and created 
design documentation and the style guide. Content was produced or existing 
content was transferred as well any relevant images, charts, and website 
downloads. Functionality and user testing began.


Phase Three integrated custom technological solutions and system extensions 
and continued testing including performance tuning. The production 
environment was prepared.


Phase Four was the release of the web site and beginning of training for 
content editors. Final system documentation was prepared and post-launch 
monitoring, optimization, and security audits was set up.


Phase Five includes ongoing management of reliable and up-to-date content, 
posting of Center News, training of investigators and staff to enter data, 
enhancement of navigability and functionality for members, member education 
about web capability, and monitoring of site usage.


The visual design for the site has already received enthusiastic endorsement 
from all seven member institutions. Training for content contributors on the 
CMS has elicited extremely positive feedback on the publishing system.


Technology and architecture of the portal or application.


DF/HCC decided to implement an open source Content Management solution that 
would be inexpensive, flexible, very powerful and customizable. The CMS had 
to be browser-neutral across multiple network and operational environments. 
It also had to support the migration to one site that was publicly 
accessible. TYPO3 met these criteria and was selected because it supported a 
very wide and deep information structure.


The CMS is highly featured but requires major customization by module, a 
resource commitment undertaken by DF/HCC. The features and customization 
capabilities will enable DF/HCC to enhance and grow the collaborative 
environment in the future. Since DF/HCC is a consortium, it was vital that 
any one person or group could enter and update his or her own information 
from any computer in the member institutions, each of which is governed by 
institution-specific IT departments with their own security and technology 
frameworks. Because of the various constituents, levels of access control 
and authorizations, and security requirements, it was important that TYPO3 
be able to interact with DF/HCC's existing security frameworks (e.g. LDAP).


Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were used to create visual interface and 
presentation style separate from the content. These style sheets made the 
design more flexible and precise in layout than what the CMS would 
originally allow.

The architecture of the site consists of three key areas: Group 
Communication, Data, and Applications.

Central communication capabilities will eventually range from a document 
management system (where the members of a group can post documents, slides, 
and presentations) to forums, mailing lists, or chats where group members 
can have real-time and on-going discussions pertaining to their research. 
The ability to subscribe to multiple lists or communities, and search 
through archived messages, is key to cross-pollination and will hopefully 
result in interesting outgrowths of common research interests that may not 
have ever been realized.



A key element in a virtual cancer center like the DF/HCC with its 
decentralized IT architecture, is the ability to share data quickly and 
securely. By creating very granular user/group combinations in the CMS, 
DF/HCC researchers will be able to create secure locations to store and 
share data. DF/HCC web development can take over management of this data and 
ensure that it is properly backed up on servers that have dedicated 
maintenance.



One of the fundamental and most critical uses of the CMS will be as a 
launching pad for new tools that enhance research. When a new tool is 
introduced, the site will enable immediate notification of the DF/HCC 
population. Any tool that is developed for either Linux or Microsoft can 
either be integrated with or accessible from the site. No matter the source 
of the tool, the site is an ideal place to organize and grant access to 
these programs, creating a virtual repository of research-enhancing 
applications that are easy to find and utilize. Some of these applications 
include virtual networking and meetings, SPORE databanks, and a service and 
equipment registry.

Unique and Innovative Features

DF/HCC will have a website that:

  a.. Requires nothing but a web browser to be used.
  b.. Is open-source in nature, employing widely used programming and 
database standards.
  c.. Distributes control of the site among the entities it represents, so 
that a Program/Core/SPORE can readily create, edit, and/or maintain content.
  d.. Employs File management practices that allow users to share documents 
with one another both within their Program/Core/SPORE or with people outside 
of their local environment.
  e.. Maintains an indexed search engine and insures that the entire site is 
searchable.
  f.. Contains built-in functionality to create forums, sitemaps, mailers, 
surveys, polls, and news feed.
§ Utilizes advanced site statistical methods so that one can determine 
accurate usage patterns.



About Enomaly


A wide range of successful companies rely on Enomaly's open source 
consulting experience to increase productivity, improve operational 
efficiency and reduce risk. Enomaly works closely with medium sized 
enterprises to plan, prepare, and coordinate achievable client-specific web 
management and open source strategies. These tools effectively allow you to 
be more efficient and operate more successfully.


Using a diverse service approach, Enomaly offers a wide range of strategic 
advisory services including business application development, 
information/content management, open source migration support.


Enomaly will cost effectively guide you through each step to ensure that 
your completed project will attract principle customers, clients and 
business partner.


About Dana-Farber / Harvard Cancer Center


The Dana-Farber / Harvard Cancer Center was conceived in 1997 and launched 
in 2000 with a five-year grant from the National Cancer Institute, and is a 
designated comprehensive cancer center. It is now the largest, but more 
importantly, most comprehensive cancer center in the world, and its 
increasing impact is confirmed by the accompanying independent statistics. 
At present, the Center has 782 senior scientists from clinical, basic, and 
population research collaborating through five (5) Core Facilities, fifteen 
(15) Disease-Based / Disciplined-Based Programs, and sixteen (16) 
Programs-In-Development.


Within the combined faculties of the Harvard medical and public health 
community resides the largest force of cancer scientists in any single 
research institution in the world. Each participating institution by itself 
has a major history of commitment and accomplishment in cancer research and 
treatment. With the creation of the Dana-Farber / Harvard Cancer Center an 
organizational structure now exists that expands the amount and depth of 
interaction and collaboration among these scientists.


  a.. HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL
  b.. HARVARD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH
  c.. DANA-FARBER CANCER INSTITUTE
  d.. MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL
  e.. BRIGHAM AND WOMEN'S HOSPITAL
  f.. BETH ISRAEL DEACONESS MEDICAL CENTER
  g.. CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL BOSTON
To accomplish its goals, the Dana-Farber / Harvard Cancer Center will not 
only continue to engage top scientists from the Harvard community, but will 
also recruit highly creative entrepreneurial scientists and engineers with 
the broadest possible spectrum of skills in its search for relevant new 
methods and technologies.