Fall 2026
PT Med
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Vue -
Nuxt.js -
Tailwind -
Strapi CMS -
Typescript
tl;dr
PT Med is a medication reference for Vancouver Coastal Health physiotherapists. It explains what a drug is for and how it affects physiotherapy treatment in the few minutes a clinician has during chart review.
Background
When a physiotherapist at Vancouver Coastal Health finds an unfamiliar medication in a patient’s chart, there is no single place to look it up. Most search Google and piece together an answer from Mayo Clinic, NIH, or UpToDate. When those sources aren’t enough, they find a nurse or pharmacist. The existing clinical references are written for prescribers. They explain what a drug does, but not what it means for getting a patient out of bed. A patient with Parkinson’s might need their session timed to when their medication kicks in. A new blood pressure medication might mean the patient could get dizzy or faint when they first stand up.
Role
I was the technical lead and sole developer. I owned the architecture, the Nuxt frontend, the Strapi content model, and the release pipeline. I also ran discovery with our UX designer, who produced the wireframes and mobile layouts. We met with the physiotherapy practice lead roughly every two weeks from August 2025 until the soft launch in September 2026.
Discovery
We ran focus groups with hospital physiotherapists at Richmond Hospital. Then we sent a survey out to the wider department and got 70 responses. A few findings shaped almost every later decision:
62 of 70 respondents preferred typing into a search box. Only 8 preferred an A–Z list and 10 preferred filters. 67 said their research starts on Google. Physios nearly always know a drug’s name.
One physio reviews about 36 beds in a little over an hour each morning. For them, spending ten minutes on one chart is a long time. They wanted short, grouped, point-form information.
People asked again and again how soon a drug starts working, when it’s strongest, and how long it lasts. Physios want to treat while a drug is working best, especially for pain and Parkinson’s medications.
48 respondents research at a desktop or workstation on wheels, 42 on a phone, and 22 on a laptop. Community physios work in patients’ homes, often with a bad connection.
Objectives
- Make search good enough to replace Google for this job. It should forgive typos and match trade names, partial words, and drug classes.
- Answer the physio question on one screen. Show what the drug is for, what to watch for, and when it’s strongest, for each way it can be given.
- Work where physios work, including on a phone in a patient’s home with a poor signal.
- Let clinicians own the content. The practice lead and a small editor group needed to add and revise medications without a developer.
Design
Our UX designer turned the findings into wireframes that we reviewed and signed off in December 2025 and January 2026. The practice lead preferred a three-column medication page that keeps as much as possible above the fold. Uses, side effects, and PT considerations sit side by side. A timing panel on the right covers each way the drug can be given.
The built page follows the signed-off wireframe closely. Many of its details came straight out of review meetings:
The same drug can peak at very different times when swallowed as a pill, injected under the skin, or given as a liquid through a feeding tube. Each route gets its own tab showing when the drug starts working, when it’s strongest, and how long it lasts.
Each drug’s uses are split into
A subsection auto-expands only when it’s short, and empty sections and fields are hidden entirely. That keeps the page scannable for drugs with sparse data.
Physios can scan them faster than prose. The CMS assigns icons, with fallbacks for any that are missing.
Search that follows you
On the homepage, search is the hero. As you scroll, the search box docks into the navbar: it’s teleported between the two positions and animated, so results stay one keystroke away. Getting this to feel solid took a few iterations.
Physios gave us feedback that the original categories could be simpler. We made drug categories a many-to-many relation, since one drug can both lower blood pressure and treat chest pain. We also included categories in free-text search, so “anticoagulant” works as well as a drug name does.
Architecture
PT Med is a Turborepo monorepo with a Nuxt 4 frontend and a Strapi 5 CMS, shipped as Docker images through a Github Actions pipeline.
Offline, only for installed users
Community physios often work with a poor signal, so PT Med installs as a
One search engine, two places
The catalogue is only a few hundred drugs, so rather than run a separate search service, I built a single search engine using MiniSearch that could be run on the server and the client. The Nuxt server runs it for web users, and the installed app runs the same code on the device, so results are identical online and offline.
I wanted to develop search ranking logic that felt intuitive. I chose closeness of match over MiniSearch’s built-in scoring, which tended to favour drugs with short entries. Matches with fewer typos score higher, as do matches on a drug’s name over its trade names or drug class. A result’s score is the sum across the words in the query. Ties go first to the result physios have picked most often in the last 90 days, then alphabetically.
Requesting new medications
When a search has no exact match, PT Med offers a medication request form, and the CMS emails each request to the PT Med team. The form is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile to keep out spam.
Useful Analytics
We wanted to know which medications physios look up most and which searches come up empty, so the team can prioritize content and improve search after launch. Google Analytics 4 loads after the page is ready, so it doesn’t slow the first view. Search updates as you type, so a search is only logged once the user engages with the results.
Results
PT Med reached 1.0 in September 2026 and soft-launched to physiotherapists at VCH.
It forgives typos, matches trade names and partial words, and turns a missing medication into a content request.
Installed users get the full catalogue offline, while regular visitors are not affected by stale content.
Our client is empowered to update medications, tooltips, resources, and page copy themselves.
On desktop, initial content loads in ~1.5 seconds and searches return in about 100ms once connected.
Since launch, we’ve been watching which medications physios look up, which searches come up empty, and what they request, and we’re using that to keep adapting PT Med to what clinicians actually need.