Information platform and social network for kidney patients and their families

Whether you've been on dialysis for years or have just been diagnosed with kidney damage, you're faced with questions you want answers to. Professional, useful information provided by an expert or someone who has experienced the issues. You will find the answers on the Kidney platform (nieren.nl)

The question

The Kidney Foundation and the Kidney Patients Association want to offer and connect reliable information to kidney patients and the people around them. In this way, kidney patients can take control and improve or strengthen their own care.

The challenge

Build a platform where expert content and user generated content are brought together in the right way so that users can easily meet their complete information and interaction needs.

The result

Kidney patients feel at home on the Kidney platform (nieren.nl), where they can ask their questions and meet each other. Moreover, the platform works so intuitively that the older target group is also happy with it.

Both the Kidney Foundation and the Kidney Patients Association want to make life more pleasant for kidney patients. The Kidney Foundation does this by raising awareness among the general public and by supporting scientific research. In turn, the Kidney Patients Association is mainly committed to the patients themselves, by developing guidelines and making contact with other patients possible. Both parties are committed to providing good information, both for patients and their environment. The Kidney platform (nieren.nl) is one of the results of this collaboration.

The platform will grow iteratively, but of course it had to be of a high standard from the start. Because when it comes to a personal and precarious subject, such as on the Kidney platform (nieren.nl), it is important to gain the trust of users from day one. By providing complete information, by offering a safe and reliable environment to exchange personal and medical data and by simplicity of use.

In short, the challenge was to create a flexible first release of the platform, whose information structure and technical architecture make it possible to continue to grow in the coming years. In this way we can let the platform move with changing wishes and insights far into the future.

Developing a complex platform such as the Kidney platform (nieren.nl) was really a challenge for us. It is a perfect combination of a meaningful platform for the users with a great degree of technical complexity behind the scenes. By drawing out the right structure from the start from all relevant perspectives (information structure, users, content sources, SEO and technical architecture), we developed a platform with many further development opportunities for the future.

Within the Kidney platform (nieren.nl), all kinds of measures have also been taken to protect patient data. The platform's advanced architecture includes different levels of security to logically separate data. This increases the safety and stability of the platform.

Virtually all content within the Kidney platform (nieren.nl) is automatically 'labelled' based on the Thesaurus Zorg en Welzijn (digital library). Intelligent links have been made between different types of content and between content and participants. Together with the semantic search function, this helps visitors to find the right information.

With the Kidney platform (nieren.nl), the Kidney Foundation has set up a user-friendly and complete platform together with the Kidney Patients Association. The various technical components are seamlessly integrated with each other. This is reflected in the user-friendliness that you experience when you visit the platform. The first users, also kidney patients or their relatives, are very satisfied with how intuitively they can consult all available information. Within one week there were already more than 200 participants! RTL also paid attention to the platform: you can read the article here.

Case highlights

The combination of technology, design and user experience made the Kidney platform (nieren.nl) an innovative project. The challenge of setting up a complete platform that supports kidney patients and their loved ones, where everyone finds the help and information they need.

•  New online and offline corporate identity
•  Rich and dynamic user interface
•  Users can create and interact with content
•  Application of encryption to store personal data securely
•  Content is tagged via thesaurus
•  Modern architecture with different security levels
•  Frontend in React Js, with application layer for logic and links
•  Headless Drupal for content management