Learn about the transformed new TGA Website

Clair Hammami

Good morning, everyone. And as Nishie says, I’m going to give a little bit of a background to the web project to talk about what we’ve been doing for the past 12 months, but also, most importantly, to show you what we’ve got and what the future website will look like.

I’d like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we are hosting this webinar, which is the Ngunnawal people, and the lands on which you might be watching this webinar from. I wish to acknowledge and show my respects for the elders past, present and emerging, and I’d also like to acknowledge any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people involved in today’s webinar.

So, I’m just going to give you a little bit of an overview of the vision, the benefits of the project, what are some of the key challenges, and most importantly, the changes, and then show you a demonstration of the website as it is today, and then also give you some mechanisms for providing feedback, because once the website goes live, we want to continue hearing from users of the website and how we can keep improving it because the website, after all, should be a living thing.

Just for some context, our website has seen a significant amount of change. So, in the past 12 months 42 million page views. There’s been 42 million page views of the TGA website. That’s more than a 300% increase from before the COVID-19 pandemic. And that’s largely been as a result of consumers.

The nature of the TGA website has changed, so we need to make sure that we are changing with that. Interestingly, about 83% of our users are new. Only about 17% are returning for the past 12 months. So, for a lot of people, when they see the new website, that will be the first time they’ve seen the website. They won’t know any different. But there is still a cohort of people who will have had experience using the website, and for them, this will be different.

About 50% of visits come from Australia, but there is a significant number from overseas. We have about 27% from the United States, and about 17% from Great Britain. So it is also an international website. It isn’t just for Australians. It is accessed from a number of different countries.

So, the vision. What are we trying to do? We’re trying to create a seamless user-friendly experience for everyone, basically, but also a website that’s easier for us to maintain, so we continue to make it meet your needs. We want it to be a modern entry point to the TGA. For many people, the website will be the only experience they have of dealing with the TGA, so we need the website to work as expected. We need it to create a sense of trust and confidence in the content that we have, and also for people to be able to easily access services that the website links to.

We have been working with our delivery partners Folk and Morpht to make this website come to life, and as I said, it has been taking us 12 months of hard work to get here.

We’re also delivering some broader Transformation Program objectives, and that is about reducing the regulatory burden. We want to make it easier for you to do business and also to make it easier for people to find the information that they’re looking for.

So, the reasons for change. As I said before, our audience has changed. We have a much broader audience now using the TGA website, and there’s different maturity levels and different expectations. In the last 12 months we’ve had 12.7 million people visit the TGA website, which is very different from pre-COVID. So we need to make sure that this website is meeting people’s needs today.

It’s hard to use and it’s hard to manage. It’s a large amount of content on the website, which means it’s very hard to find information, but also, it makes it very hard to maintain the website from the back-end perspective as well. But interestingly, what we’ve found from our analytics is about 150 pages are accessed from about a third of our website traffic. So we know, if we can make improvements to some of these pages quickly, then we’re going to be actually helping quite a large number of people.

The volume of enquiries. So, we do also know from enquiry numbers that at the moment about 40% of our enquiries are a result of the website not meeting expectations and not giving the information that people need. So this gives us an amazing opportunity. We can fix the website and hopefully have people’s questions answered early and quickly, and then they can get on with what they want to do.

Also, we’ve got inconsistencies. There’s lots of complex data repositories, siloed content. There isn’t a lot of connected information, which is impacting the customer experience or the user experience. What we want to do is make sure this website is easy to use and that it has the trust and confidence that you would expect from a regulator.

So we haven’t just done this in isolation. We’ve actually engaged with a large number of people. We’ve been using, well, our delivery partners Folk have been using a human-centred design approach, which means from very early on we went out broad through discovery. We talked to as many people as we could across many different groups to understand not only just the pain points but what are the opportunities, what can we build and make this website do to better meet your needs.

So, as it says there, more than 1,500 people, and we’ve had a fantastic response to simple things like an online survey. We had great feedback. So we’re pretty confident that what we’ve built is actually based on solid evidence and what you want.

The key themes for our project are search and findability. We want to make it simple and easy to find information. We want structured content. There needs to be a clear reason and layout for content so that you can find it easily and that the content is then layered and the language is clear.

Consistent experiences and consolidated data. We want to make sure that the experience that you have on the TGA website is consistent with other experiences on other health websites. We’ve been working with the health.gov.au team as well to make sure that there is a consistent broader department approach to our websites, so that the patterns are consistent and familiar, again, building trust.

Consolidating data. We want to make sure that all the different data that we have on our website is actually brought together in context so that you can understand how different pieces of content, different pieces of data relate to one another. Let the system do the work, not the user.

And also, again, it’s about a sense of authority. We want to make sure that our information is current, and we want to make sure that the TGA proposition, what our website is here for, and make sure it’s delivering that.

So, what we’re doing is actually changing not only just all the structure, but also the way it looks. We’re aligning it to the broader health design system, so it will look like other websites in the health portfolio, again, to make sure that experience is consistent. But most of all, we want to make sure it’s mobile-responsive so that no matter what device you’re on, you can access the information that you need.

However, like with any very large projects, there are always going to be challenges, and we’re doing everything that we can to reduce those, but it is important to note that for some people who know the current website, there will be an element of relearning. So we’re trying to do as much as we can to make information available to help with the transition to the new website.

There may be some broken links, but we’re doing a huge amount of link checking so that we can have redirects in place to minimise that. There has been a large amount of content archived. In order to improve the content, we need to archive a lot it because we realise that there was some older content there.

And along with most government departments, our archiving approach is TROVE, which is the National Library of Australia archive, and you can go onto TROVE and find any historic content of a website. And I think our TGA website goes back to 2003 on TROVE.

So, what we’re doing is we’re making sure that the experience between TROVE and our website is good, and so any content that is serial, so for example media releases, news, recalls, committees, that there will be a link off to TROVE so that you can go and find older content on there if that’s what you’re looking for. But again, focusing the website back on what its purpose is, which is to provide current and timely information about the regulation of therapeutic goods in Australia.

This was a big task. It’s the largest content project I’ve ever worked on. We migrated, there we go, 112,000 items of content. It was a huge Tetris game, matching all the content across from the current site to the future site. But I’m pretty impressed with what we’ve done, and I’m sure you will be as well.

What I’m going to do now is I’m actually going to give you a look at what our website looks like so that you can see what to expect, the caveat being, obviously, it is a development site, so you will see things like test, and there will be content that isn’t correct because we are still working on that. But what I’m demonstrating today is the functionality, the overall structure, so that you get an idea of what to expect when we launch.

Similar to the broader department’s website, we are taking a topic-based approach. We are not taking an audience-based approach. And the main reason for that is because in discovery we heard that it was very confusing to people because people could be multiple audiences, and it wasn’t clear when they needed to use which piece of content. So we’ve stripped it right back and focused on the task.

The top navigation is quite simple. Products we regulate, which is literally the what. What is it that we regulate? Product safety is around consumer health professional content. It’s really around, how do I report a problem, what do I do if there’s a recall of my product, all the information that talks about our monitoring programmes for users of therapeutic goods.

How we regulate is really the bulk of the content about how to apply, and that is what we largely think industry will use, all of the instructions from start to finish about applying for a therapeutic good.

Guidance and resources is a section where we’ve pulled together all of the disparate information across the current website into one central place. So we hope that it’s actually easier to find things quickly, to get access to data, databases, data sets, publications, resources, and it’s easy as it’s in one spot.

Then we’ve also got news and community and about us, which is the standard content you would expect, but it’s secondary content for the tasks that people are coming to our website for.

What I’ll do is I’ll just show you into how we regulate and just a little bit of the structure that we’ve been working on. Again, this is in development, so there will be things that aren’t 100% complete. What we’ve tried to do across each of the therapeutic goods is maintain consistency. So, for a lot of things there are actually very similar patterns. There are some niche parts of therapeutic goods, but where there’s something similar, we’ve tried to map that out.

Content that cuts across all of the therapeutic goods we’ve put in one place. For example, manufacturing, advertising, compliance. And rather than duplicate it, we’re going to be pointing to that content so that we can make sure that the content is published in one place, but available in many.

So, what I’ll do is I’ll just show you the difference between, say, a medical device and prescription medicines. The structure may change for launch. But it will give you an idea.

So, in medical devices we have types of medical devices, classifying what classification your device is, so all that introductory information. Manufacturing evidence, what you need to understand about labelling and packaging, what you need for your application, what are your ongoing responsibilities in managing your therapeutic good, and then how much you vary it.

Now, if I scroll down here to prescription medicines, you’ll see a similar pattern. So, not identical but it’s a similar flow, so that you’ll have, again, the application process, so the overview of the application, the different application types, what you need for your pre-submission planning, what you need to actually submit your application for your dossier, what the TGA does with that, so what we do with your application, and again, your ongoing responsibilities and how you might vary it.

So we’re trying to keep a consistent flow across the therapeutic goods, rather than duplicating content. What I’ll do as well is show you in guidance and resources. So, guidance and resources is, as I said before, a pulling together of all the things that are high volume or things that you need to access from the website. So you can quickly get access to the ARTG, the safety alerts, shortages, access to portals. We’ve got things like you can usually see the resources for new publications, or you can get access to all our databases and datasets.

In here you’ll be able to actually see a list of all of the datasets that we have across the website at the moment in one place. And I’ll just scroll down so you can see them all. So, everything is now in one place.

The other thing that we’ve done with the website is linked data. So, where there is an ARTG number or there’s a sponsor, we’ve actually connected that information so that it will display for you other relevant content that you can’t currently access on the website. And I’ll show you what I mean now.

So, I will do a search here. If I do a search for Oxycodone, what you’ll see is all the results relevant to the term Oxycodone. Down the side you’ll see there are annual charge exemptions, there’s ARTG entries, there’s Section 14 consent. There’s every single type of content that you can access from here. So, you can actually filter it down for what you might be looking for. You can also filter by topic. You might say, okay, I’m looking for advertising information, or I’m looking for information around medicine safety.

We are also tagging some content where it’s specifically relevant to an audience. In this example, there’s something here that’s been tagged for health professionals. So, you can search and filter by audience if it’s available.

What I’ll do is I’ll go in here and show you as well the AusPAR for this, for Oxycodone. So, you can see all the information about that. The other thing we’ve done as well is linked in Sponsor. So, what you can do is actually click on a Sponsor, and that will show you everything that we have relevant to that particular Sponsor. So here you can see the ARTG entries, the cancellations, the AusPARs, lab testing reports, any registrations, anything we might have relevant to that particular sponsor, and then the date.

So, as I said before, we’re starting to pull content together so that the website is doing the work and not the user.

If I open up another entry, this is an annual charge exemption, you can see information about that. And again, it relates back to an ARTG entry, so you can click on that and then see the ARTG entry.

You can see here there’s a related annual charge exemption. If I access this information straight from the ARTG search, it would show me the other information that’s relevant to this particular entry. Again, the website’s doing the work and not the user.

All right. So, what I will show you as well is the resources, which is available from guidance and resources. What you can do here is you can actually come and filter to a particular topic or a particular audience. I’m going to filter and say I’m only looking for resources relevant to medical devices.

And here we go. We can see currently I’ve got 79 types of guidance and 11 forms. So, okay, I only want guidance relevant to medical devices, and the resources are being filtered even more. Now I see 79 results, and I can search through or I can type in a search term that I’m looking for and find the guidance that I need. This just makes access to information a lot easier.

We’ve also done the same with publications. If you’re looking for a particular publication, for example, you want to access all the final scheduling decisions, you can click on that and then you will see all of those available here, and then you can search and filter for what you’re looking for. Or you can say, I want to look for something around medicinal cannabis, and it will show you the scheduling decisions around medicinal cannabis.

Finally, news and community. This is where all the typical news content will be, so access to news, media releases, product recalls, safety updates, notices, all of our events and consultations will be here, as well as our blog. All of the standard news content will sit here.

The other really exciting thing about the new website is that we have now started connecting committees with decisions with events.

So you can see a committee, you can see a committee meeting, you can see the outcomes of those committee meetings, which might be a publication or a scheduling decision. And there’s now relationships between all of those. So, like we can relate a news site to a topic, we can actually start to connect committees and their meetings and the decisions.

So, again, we’re getting the system to do the work and showing you the information, rather than you having to go and find it.

I’ll stop sharing my screen now. That’s a little insight into what our website will look like, how it will function. We do have a bit of work to do, so the icing on the cake really, the final touches and connecting up the content into the structure. But I think you’ll see that we have made significant improvements from the current website.

And as I said earlier, for us, really fundamental to this is hearing your feedback. We want to know what’s working for you and what’s, most importantly, not working so we can fix it quickly. At the bottom of every page there’s actually a link that says, is there anything wrong with this page, the same as the main department’s health.gov.au website. You can click on that, simply fill out what you were trying to do, what was wrong, submit. It will come to my team, and we can fix that and action it.

Also, at the bottom in the footer there’s a provide feedback button. We really want to hear. We want to hear your feedback so that we can continuously improve the website. We are creating resources and we will be publishing those on the current website and sharing them through social media, again, just to help with the transition to the new website.

And obviously, if you have a really complex question and you need support, then we have our TGA contact centre that you can call. And the team is doing a lot of work in providing resources to the contact centre to help them in the transition to the new website, so they can support you better.

Zaneta Morison

Thank you, everyone. We’ve got some really great questions coming through. The first one from Pam is, will the next training schedule be exactly like this training, or will more information be shared?

Clair Hammami

The next one will be the same as this one. However, if there is more information that people need, I’m happy to hear that. We can look at what we can do.

Zaneta Morison

Excellent. The next one is from Janice. Hello. Will the new website have a large amount of grey font like the demo? Black is much easier on the eyes.

Clair Hammami

So, we have modelled our designs from the Health Design System. So, we are kind of locked into a certain design to make our website experience consistent, but also, we have tested this. We’ve done a series of tests, and it’s all been quite positive. So, what you’re seeing is what it will be, but it won’t be as grey because there will be more colour. We’ve got to add that yet.

Zaneta Morison

I’ve got a question from Jin. Are you implementing redirects from old pages to new pages? Just wondering about broken links.

Clair Hammami

Yes. So, we are. We’ve done at least six iterations of link testing to make sure that links won’t be broken. So, we think we’ve got most of them. There may be still some broken, so if some aren’t working, then please let us know and we can have a look at that.

Zaneta Morison

I have a question about TGE eBS. Is there a difference?

Clair Hammami

Yes. Yes, there is. The TGA website is information. eBS is the transactional portal. There is a separate project that is underway looking at modernising the transactional portal, but this is purely information.

Zaneta Morison

I have a question about ARTG search mechanism. Is there a link to the ARTG public entry?

Clair Hammami

Yes. All of the publicly available information has actually been essentially ingested into the website, so it’s displayed. So, we will be able to display decision summaries as well as any product information and consumer medicine information will be available as well, where it relates to the product.

Zaneta Morison

We’ve had a couple of questions about the launch date. What’s the target date?

Clair Hammami

Look, I’m hoping for early August, but we don’t have an exact date yet because there are a few moving parts in the background with our Department of Finance colleagues, the GovCMS. We won’t really know yet when we can announce a launch date, but hopefully early August.

Zaneta Morison

I have another question. Thank you, they’re all coming in quite quickly, which is great. Will the prior ARGMD be moved to TROVE, given that it’s still under review?

Clair Hammami

So, the majority of our content won’t be rewritten for this launch. As you can imagine, there’s a huge amount of content. So, we’re moving over content that is on the current site and mapping it into the new structure. Once the website is launched, then there’s actually the bulk of the future work, which is the content rewrite. That is when we’ll be looking at all the content.

All that content that’s been archived is very old content. So, we aren’t archiving anything unless it is clearly no longer relevant or it’s completely out of date. So, all the guidance that’s currently on the site, if it’s being used and it’s needed, it will be transferred across to the new site.

Zaneta Morison

Great. A question about why are ACE reports published? Are they not considered private to the sponsor?

Clair Hammami

It’s publicly available on our website at the moment, so I don’t know the answer to that. That’s probably a question I’ll have to take on notice.

Zaneta Morison

Okay, that’s great. Where do we go to sign up to an email list?

Clair Hammami

So, there are subscriptions lists on our website now, ones you can subscribe to. And there isn’t one for the web project specifically, but if there’s any information that you’d like to know, then please use the email address provided, which I think was the TGA transformation program email address, and we can keep you informed. We can put that one back up I think, or add that one back in, Nishie.

Nishie

I’ve just posted that, broadcasted that to everyone.

Clair Hammami

Thank you. Thank you.

Nishie

That’s okay.

Zaneta Morison

I have a question about, at which stage of accessing the new website will a login and password be required?

Clair Hammami

There won’t be a login and password. It’s a public website with available information. There will, obviously, with the improvements to the transactional portal. That will come. But for this website, there is no login needed.

Zaneta Morison

Great. Will the older guidance material be retained on the new website, or just the latest version?

Clair Hammami

So, if by the older guidance, you mean it’s being superseded by something else, no, it won’t. We are looking to archive it. It may not be archived now, but certainly, as part of the content rewrite, any guidance that is superseded and is no longer current will be archived.

Zaneta Morison

Great. We’ve had a few emails about the RSS feed, email notifications. Will they stay as they are, or do we need to re-register for those?

Clair Hammami

So, another part of our project is improving our notifications and subscriptions. So, it won’t be available for launch, but soon after launch we will have a new system to support that, and we’ll have new options for subscriptions and notifications. So, we’ll let people know as soon as that’s available and you can have a look at what you’d like to subscribe to. But you will need to add your details again for privacy reasons.

Zaneta Morison

We have a suggestion from Nav. Have you thought about a Chatbotot for frequently asked questions?

Clair Hammami

That’s a great question. Yes, we have. But as you can appreciate, we are trying to fix the foundations for the website so that we have a really good, really solid base from which to build further enhancements. So, this launch is really about getting back to basics, improving the structure and the findability of content, and then we have a plan, Horizon Two and Horizon Three, to make continuous improvements, and one of those is to explore a virtual assistant, a chatbot, whatever you want to call it, definitely, to find and make access to simple answers easier.

Zaneta Morison

Great. We’ve got a question about, will the new website include a section on AAN versus other INCIs, technical or common aspects for individual ingredients?

Clair Hammami

I am not a technical person, so I don’t know what those acronyms stand for. I’m really sorry. I don’t know if anyone from my team wants to jump in and answer that.

Otherwise, I’m happy to take that on notice. If it’s currently available in our website, then it definitely will be. Otherwise, I can come back to you with an answer to that question.

Faye Lux

Only adding in here that AAN is an Australian Approved Names. So, it’s the Australian Approved name for ingredients. I think some of this information is already on our current website. And, yes, like Clair said, if it’s on our current website, it’s definitely going to be on the new one.

Zaneta Morison

We’ve got a question about guidance. Many historical guidance located on the website does create confusion. Which one will be removed? Sorry, I’m not…

Clair Hammami

Sorry, what was that one? Can you repeat the question?

Zaneta Morison

Yes. Sorry about that. Many historical guidance located on the TGA website creates confusion. Will these be removed?

Clair Hammami

Yes. So, similar to my answer before, when we review all the content, we will be archiving the old versions. So, if it’s been superseded, there is a new version of it, we’ll only be retaining the most up to date version, and all the previous versions will be archived. We want to make sure that the content on the website is timely, accurate and relevant, and we want to remove all the old content that might be confusing people. So, yes, we will be removing it.

Zaneta Morison

Clair, in relation to committee reports being available, will items such as outcomes from reviews from the ACMD be published?

Clair Hammami

I’m not actually sure. Basically, if there is a working group or there is a committee, and then there is an outcome from that, and it can be a published, publicly available outcome, then it will be. It might be a question I need to take on notice and talk to the medical device team. But I suspect if it can be publicly available, we will publish it.

Zaneta Morison

Great. Will there be any change in application forms for OTC, Rx or Complementary?

Clair Hammami

No. Again, the website is about the information, so we won’t be changing any of the forms or anything relating to the application process. We’re changing, improving the information, and then the access to those things. So, that will be captured as part of the improvement and enhancements to the transactional, so the eBS improvements.

Zaneta Morison

Thanks, Clair. If there is a guideline update, will it be easy to see it on the website? Currently it’s on the landing page.

Clair Hammami

So, yes. The answer is yes. What we’re trying to do is, because at the moment it’s quite confusing to people what is the most current version, because there are multiple versions, because the content will be accessed via the filters I showed you with the publications, the version that you should find on there should be the only version. If there is an announcement about a change to a guidance, then we will make that available via the website like we currently do

Also, as I said before, we’re looking at improving the notifications and subscriptions. So, we’re looking at doing more push communications so that we can notify people earlier about changes.

Zaneta Morison

Thanks, Clair. We’ve just got two more questions to go. For the project updating the eBusiness section, will you also consult with industry for feedback on improvements?

Clair Hammami

Yes. The project has been. So, similar to the way this project’s been run, they followed a human-centred design approach to identify the experience, or the preferred experience. So, they’ve done a whole bunch of discovery. So, yes, they are making sure the user experience and feedback from users is fundamental to that. But I’m sure you’ll hear more about that soon.

Zaneta Morison

Thanks, Clair. We’ve got the last question here. So, in the new website, where are the webinar and training materials located?

Clair Hammami

That will be all under news and community. So, everything about events and all webinars will be accessed via the news and community section.

Excellent. Thank you so much, everyone, for your time today. If you do have any further questions, please email the email address in the Q&A there, the tgatp@health.gov.au email, and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Some of the questions I have taken on notice. We’ll get answers to those and put them up on our website so you can find them there. But thank you once again for today. And next week’s session will be similar to this week’s session. Hope you all have a lovely afternoon.