When the faculty directory launched on hopkinsmedicine.org several years ago, it initially functioned as a find-a-doctor tool — helping patients, caregivers and referring physicians find an appropriate physician. The tool launched with data provided by sources credentialed by the institution, and it created an opportunity for faculty members, administrators and other Web content editors across the institution to post additional content.

Clinical data comes to us from other teams across Johns Hopkins including the Medical Staff Office for the Web (MSOW) and the Clinical Practice Association (CPA) for clinical faculty and physicians:

• Name (first, last, middle, suffix) and degrees
• Gender
• Languages spoken
• Departments
• Academic titles
• Board certifications and board-certified or billing specialties
• Education (medical, residencies, fellowships)
• Locations and contact information

This baseline data is useful; however, we relied for some time on our faculty or their representatives to complement it with the types of content that appeal to physician peers, research colleagues or consumer audiences. Unfortunately, a 2013 audit revealed that very few profiles included information beyond these basic fields. In fact, only 451 of 2,651 profiles had any copy in the biography field, which is usually the first content that any faculty member or supporting editor adds to a profile, and one that many Web visitors — whether patients and caregivers or colleagues in research or medicine — are likely to review.

As I spoke with faculty, they expressed that the ability to update their profiles is very important to them; however, they did not want a good profile be dependent on their participation.

With this in mind, I opted to reallocate more than 50 percent of the Internet Strategy operating budget to the faculty directory. It would mean mothballing the technical development of other key areas of the website and freezing other opportunities, but it enabled us to dedicate unprecedented resources to acquiring, authoring and presenting high-quality faculty data, and to doing a multistage rebuild of the infrastructure that enabled data workflows, back-end management and Web publishing. These projects occur on an ongoing, incremental basis.

Reflecting Research, Education and Patient Care in Faculty Bios

In November 2013, we launched a pilot project for the Department of Medicine that expanded our profiles beyond a traditional find-a-doctor model to present 100 full-time, dedicated research faculty members who have no clinical obligations.

The project resulted from eight months of collaboration with leadership, feedback and faculty reviews. Myron Weisfeldt, Landon King and Stephen Desiderio shaped the high-level vision, while Ellen Stein, Bama Sampath, Robin DiCocco, Joe Marine, Li Gao, Christian Merlo and Ellen Reather shared their experiences with similar tools and feedback from patients. All were engaged in reviewing design iterations leading up to launch.

We sought to demonstrate both the competence and compassion of our faculty. We added data points from the School of Medicine registrar to serve as a foundation. The data includes JHED IDs and other private fields to validate quality. Additionally, the registrar provides the following publicly displayed details:

• Name (first, last, middle, suffix) and degrees
• Departments and divisions
• Academic titles

And the team got to work adding additional content, including:

• Research interests, technology expertise keywords, and summaries (See examples on the following profiles: Aravinda Chakravarti, Qian-Li Xue, Lucio Gama, Valina Dawson)
• PubMed, Google Scholar, SciVal and LinkedIn URLs (See examples on the following profiles: Gedge Rosson and Michele Manahan)
• Labs, core facilities (See examples on the following profiles: Cory Brayton, Juan Troncoso), clinical trials and keywords (See examples on the following profile: Gerard Mullin)
• Academic program affiliations, courses taught, and lectures and presentations (See examples on the following profiles: Cory Brayton, Ada Hamosh, Thomas Traill)
• Videos, podcasts or other multimedia that enable audiences to gain deeper insight into the expertise and character of individual faculty members (See examples on the following profiles: Lisa Cooper and Andrew P Feinberg)
• Contact information for research inquiries

Today, the directory presents over 900 nonclinical research profiles from the school of medicine and the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences. These profiles are found on our Find a Researcher tool, featured on hopkinsmedicine.org/research. Modeled after Find a Doctor, this tool serves to attract and foster collaboration and engagement between colleagues, students and other academics.

Before and After

View Before

View After

Putting It All Together

Technical development to add these fields and to enable workflows and data capturing is an ongoing process. Internal and external development teams partner to produce major iterations on a rolling basis. The first major update that enabled the presentation of these new data fields launched in July 2014.

Content acquisition efforts are equally extensive. Writers gather content by researching individual faculty members, just as anyone outside the institution might do. They use search engines to gather information from websites published by Johns Hopkins entities, the professional affiliations of faculty members and physicians, and individuals’ independent websites. The content is validated and rewritten for the central profiles.

Whenever possible, internal team members do this work. Content specialists or marketing managers who are funded by specific service lines or institutional priorities balance this work with other daily responsibilities. Additionally, we contract an outside team of content writers, led by the former associate Web director of one of America’s leading academic medical centers, who author approximately 40 profiles every month.

And in the meantime, one thing has remained constant: Faculty members and physicians can always revise their own profiles to update what they consider most important. Clicking the “Is this You? Edit Profile” button at the bottom of individual profiles is the easiest way to do this.