Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA)

Introduction

The Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA) plays an important role in ensuring the safety and effectiveness of health products in Ireland.

Their remit and regulatory functions include human and veterinary medicines, clinical trials, medical devices, controlled drugs, blood and blood components, tissues and cells, and cosmetic products.

In 2023, the HPRA embarked on a major website redesign and development, with the goal to:

• Make the website an essential digital resource for all stakeholders.
• Create a unified and accessible digital experience for audiences to access updates and services on any device.
• Improve efficiency by connecting the website with internal systems to automate processes and reduce manual workload.

Discovery & Architecture

Understanding all stakeholders' needs is the foundation for defining a new website's architecture and features. The discovery phase focused on gathering insights, research, aligning priorities, and laying the foundation for the redesign.

Discovery focused on

• Internal stakeholder engagement and research to identify expectations, needs, and opportunities.
• Developing personas to identify and define the requirements for external audiences.
• Competitor analysis to benchmark best practices in regulatory website design, identifying features and structures that could enhance usability and accessibility.
• Conducting information architecture (IA) workshops with card sorting to align internal teams on content categorisation, usability and intuitiveness.
• Building an information architecture and content structure that represented all stakeholders' needs and delivered a scalable and intuitive solution for the future.
• Developing visual mood boards to define the new website's visual identity, combined with a selection of wireframes for complex pages and journeys, ensured the IA, UX, UI design, and accessibility supported the site's more complex objectives for the product search pages.

Technology & Launch

HPRA has been a long-term Progress Sitefinity customer, and the new website harnesses the latest capabilities and features to continue this partnership. These capabilities deliver a digital platform that enables the HPRA's team to create, publish and disseminate information to all audiences in a targeted and tailored manner.

Custom-built search features offer an improved interface and enhanced searching and filtering functionality for medicines and products intended for human and animal use. An alert feature called MyAlerts delivers the latest HPRA safety and regulatory updates tailored to subscribers' needs.

The website delivers an accessible and seamless experience across all targeted browsers and devices and is hosted on Azure to ensure a scalable, secure, and uninterrupted experience. ArekiboCare provides a fully managed service level agreement to support the HPRA's team.

The new website launched in January 2025. Visit www.hpra.ie and read their website launch release.