STAUFFER had the honor of partnering with the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation on the Army of Women (AOW) site, which is an innovative new initiative connecting women and men of all ages, ethnicities, and locations with researchers committed to the fight against breast cancer.
The Army of Women (AOW) extends membership to anyone over the age of 18, regardless if they are a breast cancer survivor or never affected by the disease. Once a member, you may share studies ineligible to participate in, with friends and family. Furthering research addressing critical questions, and helping to develop a better understanding of breast cancer.
AOW members may register for Online Studies HERE
The Challenge
Challenging the Scientific Community.
At STAUFFER, we believe that challenges offer a unique opportunity to elevate our best self, push us beyond our comfort zone, and achieve personal optimization.
From the construction of proper workflows that determine participant eligibility for research proposal submissions and a secure environment that assures confidentiality, to a user-friendly dashboard for researchers to track the status of their proposals. One does not simply develop great concepts, they engineer viable solutions for the future.
The Solution
Join the Army of Women (AOW).
Blood, sweat & tears.
Placing exceptional skill and mastery at the forefront, our team ensured proper measures were administered such as performing extensive testing, in order to combat the defined challenges. From integrating Drupal modules that determine participant eligibility, such as a Drupal workflow module that holds a series of rules and actions which trigger accordingly, with a Drupal webform module that includes “conditional fields” on the webform template. To custom code that safeguards the confidentiality of members, by maintaining the system data saved to a user’s profile and eligibility to participate in past studies.
Replacing its existing system, which contained confidential records of over 300,000 participants and 2,000 studies, with an updated version. Required a diligent team to safely migrate its data, without losing a single record of previous activity. Additionally, back-end solutions were enforced to determine which elements are displayed to individual users. These solutions include Drupal Views and Customs Code, which grants the Researcher’s, Scientific Advisory Committee, and Foundation users access to tabs containing sortable tables of content on the front-end.
The user flows for this system required complex logic that ensured proper review, data integrity, and security of personally identifiable information at every step of the way.
The Mobile Application
In addition to expanding our website – we wanted to expand our user base beyond white women in their 60’s. Breast cancer research needs diversity – both in age and ethnicity – to understand why breast cancer affects some women differently.
To expand the program into a new, younger, and more diverse market, we created an Army of Women app. This app has the full functionality of the site for participants.
Once we understood the application, we built the mobile application in React, using the Drupal database as the source of user data and registrations, study participation, and content. This enabled us to streamline the creation of native apps for both iOS and Android.
Outcomes
The Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation has now been running the new Army of Women website and mobile app since the end of October 2018, and we now have a few month’s worth of actual data with which to evaluate our success.
The principal goal of AOW is to connect participants with researchers, which means that study enrollment is the number one metric for success.
With the launch of the new website, combined with the mobile app, we saw:
- A 29.4% increase in signups on existing studies
- A 77.3% increase in new study enrollments
This was an unexpected rate of success, of which we are very proud.
Learn more about our process and outcomes by reading our slide deck from our presentation at DrupalCon Seattle 2019, Growing the Army of Women.