Can you harness the power of a contact manager to drive change in healthcare policy making?

McMaster’s Health Forum was in its early stages, in temporary office space. But the group was a force to be reckoned with—a new force for disseminating information, gathering consensus and propelling policy making in healthcare. They were working to improve health outcomes through collective problem solving, and presenting new concepts to us all.

The Health Forum needed to introduce themselves to the University, the community, Canada, and the rest of the world. The vehicle to introduce them would be their new website. There was just one hitch though—the new site had to be driven by their contact manager.

Bob thought about the challenges and the possibilities this would offer the group, and set to work with a gifted programmer, Patricia Monger, head of High Performance Computing at McMaster.

The new website would be a rich information hub, sharing ideas and data with multiple audiences: citizens, clinicians, public health providers, policy makers, and students. It had to reach out to these various audiences, and connect them to events, especially ones where their participation was critical.

What pleased us most when the website launched? Probably the ground-breaking code that drove the site, and the way the information was organized. Plus the stylish black and white photographs of the key players. The site was one step in the process of launching the McMaster Health Forum, a real force for change in the lives of all Canadians.