Project Snapshot
- Client: Learn at Pinnacle
- Industry: Healthcare Continuing Education (CME/CE)
- Services: Technical Consulting, UX/Logic Design, Web Development, QA & Iteration
- Agency: White Coat SEO
Key Results
- 1,500 certificates generated
- 80 partners acquired
- 250 hours of manual processing saved
The Problem
Learn at Pinnacle is a healthcare education platform that provides accredited continuing education (CE) to clinicians across the US. They work with a growing network of accreditation partners who run their own activities, like conferences, enduring courses, and podcast-based learning.
The issue? Every time a partner ran an activity, Pinnacle’s team had to manually generate certificates for each participant. At roughly 90 seconds per certificate, this was eating up serious admin time. Multiply that across dozens of partners and thousands of learners, and it quickly becomes unsustainable.
On top of that, there was no clean way to collect survey data for compliance reporting, no automated connection between partner activities and user accounts, and no streamlined path to get new users onto Pinnacle’s app.
They needed a system that could handle all of this, without adding complexity for the end user.
What We Built
We designed and developed a fully automated certificate generation system within Pinnacle’s existing WordPress LMS. The project covered everything from initial scoping and logic mapping through to Figma design, development briefing, and multiple rounds of testing and iteration.
Here’s what the system does at a high level:
For Admins, we created a custom post type (“Partner Activities”) that lets the Pinnacle team spin up a new activity in minutes. They choose the partner, set the credit type and amount, define survey questions (both standardized and custom, per-section or general), and the system generates a unique survey link automatically. No manual certificate building. No approval bottleneck.
For Users, the experience is simple. They click a link, fill in a short survey, and receive their CE certificate by email straight away. If they’re already logged into the app, the certificate lands in their CE dashboard automatically. If they’re new, the system creates an account for them using the data they’ve already entered, so there’s zero friction.
For Partners, the system supports two distinct flows. Flow 1 (App + Web) works for anyone with a browser or the app installed, making it ideal for large events where not everyone has an account. Flow 2 (App-Only) is designed for partners who want to drive app adoption, guiding users through a streamlined onboarding before they can access the survey.
The Design and Logic Challenge
This wasn’t a simple form-to-PDF job. The logic had to account for multiple user states (logged in, logged out, account matched by email, brand new user), multiple credit types (11 accreditation bodies, each with their own requirements), conditional fields (like ePID and Date of Birth for ACPE credits), and optional reflection requirements that route submissions through an approval queue before certificates are issued.
We mapped out every permutation across desktop and mobile for both flows, designed the full UI in Figma, and wrote a detailed technical spec that the development team could work from with minimal back-and-forth.
Survey logic also had to be flexible enough to support multi-section activities, where each section gets its own set of standardized evaluation questions plus optional custom questions set by the admin. The form dynamically generates based on how the activity is configured in the backend.
Compliance and Data
Healthcare CE is heavily regulated, so the data layer was just as important as the user-facing experience.
Every submission is stored per-activity in the WordPress backend and exportable as CSV, with full survey responses, credit types, user demographics, and timestamps. We made sure exports could be filtered by activity or by partner, with multi-activity exports split across tabs for easy reporting.
We also built in marketing opt-in tracking (synced to Squarespace Email Campaigns via API), duplicate submission prevention, and metadata logging for consent compliance.
Certificate emails include the PDF attachment directly (not zipped), with tailored copy depending on whether the user is new, existing, or had their reflection approved.
Results
Since launch, the system has handled over 1,500 certificates, each one that would have previously taken around 90 seconds of manual work. That’s roughly 37 hours of admin time saved so far, and growing.
Pinnacle’s partner network has scaled to 80 partners, a number that would have been extremely difficult to manage under the old manual process.
Perhaps most notably, daily app downloads have doubled since the partner certificate system went live. By making the app the natural home for CE tracking and creating a frictionless sign-up path within the survey flow, every partner activity now becomes a user acquisition channel.
Our Role
White Coat SEO handled the full consulting and design lifecycle for this project:
- Discovery and scoping to understand Pinnacle’s workflows, partner needs, and compliance requirements
- Technical specification covering admin setup, survey logic, certificate generation, user flows, email templates, and data exports
- UX and UI design in Figma across all user states, devices, and flows
- Development briefing with a detailed spec that minimized ambiguity for the engineering team
- QA, testing, and iteration across multiple rounds, catching edge cases around credit type conditional fields, reflection queues, and email matching logic
Why It Matters
For CME and healthcare education companies, partner activities are a major growth lever. But without the right infrastructure, they create admin overhead that doesn’t scale.
This project shows what happens when you pair deep understanding of the healthcare education space with smart technical design: you get a system that saves time, improves compliance, delights users, and drives measurable growth.
White Coat SEO is a healthcare-focused SEO agency and tech consultancy. We help medical education companies, CME providers, and health tech platforms build the systems and strategies that drive sustainable growth.
Interested in what we could build for you? Get in touch.