Primary Care Physicians Web Site

WordPress Development

The "LAMC Primary Care" web site is an inward facing site used by primary care physicians at Kaiser Permanente's Los Angeles Medical Center. It runs on WordPress, and uses a highly customized theme that, in addition to providing the desired layout and look, provides specialized searching and sorting of a large number of clinical reference documents, patient handouts, and other resources. The custom theme also provides two active event calendars, one for events and training for the doctors, the other for training and classes for patients. The calendar functionality is provided by a custom plug-in. The site had been live for some years when I was contracted to update it, and add some significant functionality to it.

One of the first features I added was the "Patient Handouts" tab. With thousands of documents available for the doctors to give to patients, a quick method of finding the appropriate one was needed. A generic tag and title search was already available, but the client a more interactive "point & click" method. I implemented this as a set of filters that could be applied to narrow the listing down to a few possibilities. I also wrote a custom import program in PHP to populate the WordPress database from user supplied data. This program imported each document entry as a post, and applied the appropriate Custom Post Type, Custom Taxonomy, categories, tags, etc.

The next feature I added was the "Patient Education" tab which used a custom calendar plug-in to display the calendar (i.e. draw the grid, and list views) and to provide dynamic filtering of the event list. The events can be filtered by category, the particular Kaiser facility that will host the class, language, time of day, cost, and tags. The calendar plug-in also provided an admin page to allow add/edit/delete functionality but for initial launch of the feature, a batch method of importing was needed so again, I wrote a custom import program in PHP to convert user supplied data into WordPress posts.