Pedro Robalo

Work

PKD Digest

Weekly bilingual digest on cystic kidney disease: plain language for patients and families, clinical notes for clinicians.

Overview and role

PKD Digest (Digest DRP) is a weekly bilingual (EN+PT) curated digest on cystic kidney disease (cystic kidney disease in general, not only ADPKD). I design, build, and curate it: content model, publication pipeline, and the weekly review loop.

Problem and users

Two audiences, one publication: patients and families who need plain language, and clinicians who need precision. Raw paper feeds serve neither, and health content must never blur into medical advice.

Constraints and risks

  • Every item carries dual framing: a plain-language summary plus a clinical note, in both languages.
  • Nothing publishes without human review; assisted shortlists stay drafts until a person decides.
  • Explicit boundary: educational curation only, not medical advice.
  • Privacy by default: no analytics in v1.

Key decisions

  • Eleventy 3 + Bun static publication, following the same patterns as this Portfolio: path prefix, locale routing, and front-matter content validation.
  • One-file content model: each src/content/items/*.md card holds nested summary.en/pt and clinicalNote.en/pt, with status (draft/published) and issue tags.
  • Assisted, never automatic, curation: a shortlist script fetches public PubMed candidates into draft cards, and a weekly review step promotes only the keepers, with completed EN+PT framing and status: published.
  • Digest, timeline, guides, glossary, and search as the public surfaces, in both languages.

Quality strategy

  • Front-matter content validation gates every build.
  • Vitest unit coverage plus Playwright end-to-end checks, including axe accessibility.
  • Lighthouse CI on the built site.
  • oxlint and oxfmt with pre-commit hooks, plus GitHub Actions CI and Pages deploy on every push to main.

Outcome and evidence

A live bilingual digest with a review-gated publishing loop. The code is private. Live demo:

Lessons and next steps

  • Dual framing forces honesty: if the plain-language version cannot be written, the item is not ready.
  • Keeping automation on the draft side of the gate preserves trust: the human publish decision is the product.