In 2015 -CMPT surveyed participant attitudes towards our online informatics presence. Unfortunately, there were a number of concerns highlighted with respect to its functionality and friendliness. CMPT committed to revise the site
An opportunity arose in 2018 when our data entry provider developed some in-company problems.
CMPT then decided to move the data entry and access to results out of a third party and develop its own system and website (member.cmpt.ca). This was possible by using WordPress open sourced platform which allowed CMPT to be fully in control the design and to make our own adjustments as required. The new design was envisioned and developed by our program coordinator Esther Kwok and our editor/web master Veronica Restelli.
The process of design, functionality, and implementation took about 6 months to complete.
After the system had been up and running for 6 months and all laboratories and programs had had the chance to use it, a survey was sent out to all CMPT participants. As per our norm, the survey was offered on-line through Survey Monkey (San Mateo California). The survey was anonymous and responders had the opportunity to complete answers and to provide free text comments. The survey was made available for approximately 4 weeks, with a reminder sent out after 2 weeks.
We received responses from 55 participants (approximately 44% of total). The distribution on responses was from across Canada, consistent with our laboratory base, and covered people in all our participating provinces. Because of the participation rate and the distribution both geographic and programmatic was so strong, we are confident the results of the survey are generalizable to the full population of CMPT participants.
Without going into full detail, one question was based on appearance of the site and another on functionality.
With respect to being new, fresh, and visibly appealing the participants strongly supported the new site with 78% rating as either 4 or 5 stars (Figure 1).
With respect to friendliness and functionality when entering data, a similar sized majority rated the site as either 4 or 5 (out of 5) stars (Figure 2).
In a separate question, we asked if respondents were aware that CMPT maintains its library of informative critiques for clinical bacteriology, mycology, and enteric parasitology available on the website for member to access. We were pleased to find that almost 90 percent of respondents and their laboratories used our library of information for their clinical bacteriology, mycology, and enteric parasitology research or investigations or teaching.
We are thus pleased that we have been able to improve our customer experience with the data entry and reports website (member.cmpt.ca). This is particularly important because as important as it is for us to provide high quality, clinically relevant samples, if our information is difficult to enter or access, we understand we are not meeting our customer needs.
Editor’s comments
One of the big advantages of this website re-development is that it is now managed at CMPT which allows us to make changes more readily.
Based on the comments received, we have changed the Clinical Bacteriology form to include drop down menus to choose biochemical tests instead of making the labs to enter them manually.
We have also created tutorials to demonstrate the use of the site for labs or technologists entering or checking results for the first time.
From some comments received, we also recognize that there is a little bit of confusion between our main website (cmpt.ca) and our data entry website (member.cmpt.ca); this may take a little time to get used to.
More importantly, CMPT is committed to improve the customer’s experience and we would like to use this opportunity to invite laboratories to continue to give feedback on this matter.
You can send your suggestions to restelli@mail.ubc.ca
Thank you
Veronica Restelli
