Pharmaceutical platforms
Sandoz: a compliant web platform for more than 100 markets
I contributed to a global pharmaceutical platform where localisation, medical review, market eligibility, accessibility, and editorial speed had to coexist in one publishing model.
The system I joined
Regional teams needed to publish quickly across more than 100 markets, while medical, legal, and regulatory approval remained independently auditable for every applicable jurisdiction.
The same platform served public visitors, healthcare professionals, patients, and regulatory stakeholders with different access and content requirements.
Where I contributed
I worked on the headless content architecture, market-variant model, approval workflow, search experience, and performance and accessibility controls.
The architecture treated approval state as part of the content model rather than a process tracked outside the publishing system.
Decision trail
Constraints became architecture.
Each decision below connects a concrete limitation to the engineering response and its practical effect.
- 01
Constraint
A simple translation model could incorrectly reuse one market's regulatory approval in another jurisdiction.
Decision
Model clinical and promotional blocks as market variants with independent applicability and approval state.
Impact
An approval in one country never silently authorises publication in another.
- 02
Constraint
Reviewers lost time switching to staging simply to understand what a content change would look like.
Decision
Provide rendered previews inside the medical-legal-regulatory workflow and route lower-risk editorial changes through a defined lighter track.
Impact
The preview removed roughly half a day from common review cycles, while more than 30% of submissions used the appropriate streamlined path.
- 03
Constraint
Pharmaceutical tables and gated content had to remain usable across keyboard and screen-reader workflows.
Decision
Test each reusable component with NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver before admitting it to the shared component library.
Impact
An independent launch audit verified WCAG 2.1 AA compliance without a late remediation sprint.
Outcome
What the work produced
- The platform supported more than 100 market sites and over 30 locales.
- First-submission completion of the full approval chain reached 78% in the first quarter.
- Medicine-finder queries stayed below 400 milliseconds at p95.
- Market-specific publication and healthcare-professional gating were encoded in the platform rather than handled manually.
Technology
Regulated publishing becomes faster when the platform makes the correct path obvious. Removing ambiguity from approval state was more valuable than removing approval steps.
Abrar Ahmed