Case study
Real-time study data: a custom Vue map for healthcare professionals
A bespoke front-end build for a global pharmaceutical company, delivered through Kanga Health. Scope: a single information page for healthcare professionals, and the interactive regional tool built into it. The tool was the most technically distinctive part, and is the focus of this case study.
Problem
A global pharmaceutical company needed a single information page giving healthcare professionals current information about an ongoing drug study. A key requirement was an interactive world map showing study centres and current participant numbers. This data would change often, so the page had to update without a redeploy.
Challenge
The information differed by region. A clinician picked theirs on the map and saw only what applied there. It also had to stay current: when the study data changed, the page had to reflect it straight away, with the client making those updates themselves and no rebuild or developer in the loop. That ruled out baking the content into the build.
On top of that, the site ran on a tightly governed enterprise version of Drupal CMS. You built from an approved set of in-house components, and anything bespoke had to be signed off as a decoupled component before it could go on a page. An interactive map with a live data feed was not something you could drop in: it had to be designed as an approved component and made to sit alongside the platform’s native ones.
Solution
I built the information page and the regional tool within it. The page sat within the platform’s standard component system. The tool was the bespoke part: a custom Vue map component where a clinician selects a region and sees the information mapped to it, with the data served from a Firebase backend so the client could update it and have the change appear immediately, outside any deployment cycle.
The tool itself went in as a decoupled component, built to behave like a native part of the page rather than an add-on.
Outcome
The tool gave healthcare professionals a single current source for the study’s regional information, maintained by the client without developer involvement.
The live data sits in Firebase, separate from the CMS, and that was as much about what the platform would take as what I’d have reached for on an open stack. It works, and it gave the client real-time updates with no developer in the loop, but it leaves the content in one system and the live data in another. On a freer build I’d want those two closer together.