We’re excited to announce that our next release, VitalSite 5.2.7 is finishing final testing, and includes 48 new features and improvements. Each quarterly release is packed with items big and small, and is part of our way to keep clients at the forefront of eHealth. Most of the new capabilities were requested by our clients, and range from minor enhancements to big new ideas.

One of my favorite new features builds on one of our core technologies: SmartPanels.

SmartPanels gives you the ability to automatically show links to related content as you browse the site. It’s important that it be automatic, because managing all of those links manually across thousands of content pages would be extremely time consuming.

Asante Health System has a good example of a SmartPanel on their cancer service line page at Rogue Valley Medical Center.

But in this latest release, we’ve taken this several steps further, allowing clients to deploy much more advanced panels that previously required technical work. For example, on a page about the cancer services at the Cedarview Clinic, we can create panels that:

• Show doctors that are employed at Cedarview and specialize in oncology
• Show only featured doctors that practice at Cedarview and specialize in oncology
• Show a randomly ordered list of oncologists from the entire directory
• Show all doctors that practice at the Cedarview Cancer Center location, regardless of specialty
• Show the doctors with specialties that match the settings for the section you’re in, override it with custom settings, or mix the two – which has big implications for larger organizations with complex political hierarchies and numerous facilities.
• Show the doctors at a location that accept a particular health insurance plan, speak a particular language, or are otherwise filtered in variable ways

The new features allow configuration of how many doctors should be displayed, and visual styles on a field-by-field basis for each individual panel. It works for classes & events, locations, and other panels too.

The hat trick in this release is that all of that can be done automatically by VitalSite, based on the page you’re looking at – you don’t have to set each one up manually or worry about any programming.

And the other 47 new features in this release? We’ll highlight a few of those in subsequent posts.