Sector(s)

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Community contributions

Several modules were contributed back to Drupal.org over the course of this project, including:

Promoting a High-Performing Health Care System

The Commonwealth Fund is a private foundation promoting better access, quality and efficiency for health care systems through independent research and grantmaking. The foundation is particularly focused on impacting the lives of society’s most vulnerable, including those who are low-income, uninsured and people of color. Founded in 1918, the Commonwealth Fund was among the first private foundations started by a woman philanthropist, Anna M. Harkness.

We worked with the Commonwealth Fund to completely redesign its Health System Data Center, a platform for exploring state health system data through custom tables, graphs and maps. With interactive visualizations covering dozens of topics, roughly 100 indicators, and tens of thousands of individual metrics, the platform helps make underlying data actionable for advocates, policy makers and journalists tackling healthcare system issues all over the country.
 

About the project

Key Challenges

  • Design an intuitive, user-centered experience for exploring the Commonwealth Fund’s rich data with interactive charts and graphs.
  • Empower authors to craft strategic narratives with data visualizations, telling stories effectively with the data.
  • Provide a powerful, easy-to-use administrative experience for managing the data.

The Solution

  • We designed a bold, strikingly simple interface for browsing complex data, with interactive visualizations, responsive search capabilities, and curated featured content.
  • Commonwealth Fund authors can write strategic narratives and embed illustrative datasets, helping users contextualize the data.
  • Built with Drupal 8, the platform offers drag-and-drop tools for updating complex data by uploading CSVs. Commonwealth Fund staff can use their existing workflows to collect the data and simply upload it via a simple admin interface.

Why Drupal was chosen

The Commonwealth Fund’s primary website was recently upgraded to Drupal 8, and the organization sought to standardize on a single technology stack. While the Health System Data Center was built as a separate, standalone website, it provides a familiar interface for the foundation’s staff to manage their data. Further, the websites leverage single sign-on to offer a seamless administrative experience. Using Drupal allowed us to build intuitive authoring interfaces for managing complex data.
 

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

CAS provides single sign-on for administrators moving between the Commonwealth Fund’s main website and the data center website.
The Datasets module bundles several custom entities to provide a structure for data visualization projects out-of-the-box.

JS Entity passes entity field properties to JavaScript via Drupal’s JS API.

JS Component offers developers a way to define custom JavaScript applications using YAML configuration files.

MarkJS Search provides integration with MarkJS for fast, responsive on-page search results, similar to using “Command-F” in your browser.

Entity Importer offers a drag-and-drop interface for uploading CSVs to update data.

Entity Extra Field provides a visual interface for adding blocks and tokens as “Pseudo Fields” to entities.

For more information on these modules, check out this blog post from Aten: Six Drupal 8 Modules for Working with Datasets.