Hyperspheric Solutions has been working closely with a consortium of 5 of the 9 English Public Health Observatories to specify, design and develop an engine to drive their web sites. By working together in this way the PHOs were able to achieve significant cost savings over an approach that involved 5 independent web sites to be developed.

Helping users do their jobs:

• Simple search facilities for first-time users and advanced searching for expert users.
• Wizards to guide users through the contribution process and to simplify site management.
• A contact directory and supporting tools such as an events calendar to help site users to network.
• Single sign-on between PHORMS sites and other compatible systems such as PHeNet and MKi.

Helping users find what they are looking for:

• A powerful search engine with support for complex boolean conditions, federated searching, caching and paging of results and translation between schemas for searching of heterogeneous sites.
• A "metadata cache" for rapid access to metadata harvested from other PHORMS sites and from PHOs that are not using PHORMS.
• Use of the NPHL thesaurus to handle synonyms for search terms etc.
• Secure federated searching between PHORMS sites and other compatible systems.

Helping site managers keep information up to date:

• A resource management system adhering to Dublin Core and e-GMS standards.
• Fine-grained access control to control exactly who can access which resources.
• Mechanisms to manage workflows such as processing registration requests and identifying resources whose metadata is due for review, etc.
• Reporting tools to help manage resource through the identification of potential duplicates, etc.

East Midlands Public Health Observatory (EMPHO)

EMPHO's web site uses the PHORMS "engine" to deliver information to the front end which was designed by EMPHO.

Eastern Region Public Health Observatory (ERPHO)

ERPHO's web site uses the PHORMS "engine" to deliver information to the front end which was designed by ERPHO.

London Health Observatory (LHO)

LHO's web site uses the PHORMS "engine" to deliver information to the front end which was designed by the LHO.

South East Public Health Observatory (SEPHO)

SEPHO's web site uses the PHORMS "engine" to deliver information to the front end which was designed by Hyperspheric Solutions Limited.

Yorkshire and Humber Public Health Observatory (YHPHO)

YHPHO's web site uses the PHORMS "engine" to deliver information to the front end which was designed by YHPHO.