Who They Are

Duke Medicine conceptually integrates the Duke University Health System, the Duke University School of Medicine, and the Duke University School of Nursing. It is the combination of research, clinical care, and education that takes place through the efforts of faculty, staff, students, and trainees at many different sites throughout their region and worldwide.

As a world-class academic and health care system, Duke Medicine strives to transform medicine and health locally and globally through innovative scientific research, rapid translation of breakthrough discoveries, educating future clinical and scientific leaders, advocating and practicing evidence-based medicine to improve community health, and leading efforts to eliminate health inequalities.

DukeHealth.org is a site for patients and the public that represents all health services at Duke. DukeHealth.org makes videos available related to physician interviews, classes and lecture series, and community classes.

YouTube and Duke Medicine

Video is an important part of of DukeHealth.org. The site strives to helps patients learn about health and health care, and through the videos available on DukeHealth.org, the public can learn about all sorts of health related topics -- from the latest research on Parkinson's to common causes of neck and back pain.

The team found that YouTube was the easiest and most cost effective way to reach people. Not only could people visiting the DukeHealth.org website stream the information they needed, but the vast YouTube audience could also search and find these videos as well. As an academic institution, cost was a major consideration, and at $0, it felt like a good deal. Additionally, there was the added benefit of knowing that YouTube would continue to improve and add features as time went on (like captions, annotations, etc.). It also shows that Duke can recognize and use the new social media tools out there today.

Impact

On average, Duke's content now receives 3 times the number of views that the videos previously received when just hosted on the Duke site.

What They Did

All of the videos for DukeHealth.org are hosted on the DukeMedicine YouTube channel. Nightly, a feed of the videos is pulled from YouTube into DukeHealth.org's CMS (content management system). The full set of YouTube metadata is stored in the CMS, allowing the videos to be accessed as standard content types. This allows the videos to be listed in the Health Library video section of the Web site, embedded throughout the site, and found via site-search.

The CMS is written in Python and based on the Zope framework, which made the Google Data Python Client Library a natural fit when integrating the YouTube video feed. Keeping the CMS metadata in sync with the the videos in DukeMedicine's YouTube channel is a two step process.

First, the nightly script finds new YouTube videos and creates metadata records in the CMS for each one. A call is made to GetYouTubeVideoFeed() passing the URI for the feed of all DukeMedicine uploads. All the entries in this feed are iterated over. If there is no metadata for a particular video ID, a new metadata record is created with the YouTube ID, title, description, duration, and published date from the feed entry. The new record is then submitted for review to DukeHealth.org's content manager. He'll see the new records in his pending queue the next morning and can decide whether or not to publish them.

Second, there may be metadata records in the CMS that no longer have corresponding videos on YouTube. The script finds these and retracts them from the CMS. For each published CMS record that wasn't encountered while iterating over the feed in the previous step, a call is made to GetYouTubeVideoEntry(). If a 404 error occurs, the script retracts the record.