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Calling all Innovators: Demo @ the Next Health Datapalooza

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 15:21:41 +0000

Todd Park, US Chief Technology Officer/ Bryan Sivak, Chief Technology Officer, HHS

This is a cross-post from a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy blog.

“Transformation” is the best description of what is happening in health care right now. We are seeing historic changes in how health care is administered in the United States—with increased focus on quality of care versus just paying for a service. We are seeing changes in how people can enroll in health insurance—with the upcoming establishment of a new market place that will help more people get insured in this country than ever before. And, we are seeing changes in how people understand and make decisions about their own health—with an increasing number of tools and services becoming available to help individuals access health information and manage their own personal health data.

Data is fuel for innovation, and developers and entrepreneurs are key players who can turn that fuel into innovations that matter. That’s why one of the many ways the Federal Government is contributing to the transformation of health care is by unleashing vast amounts of data from the vaults of government, while rigorously protecting privacy. These public data resources, made openly available in machine-readable form, include a broad range of useful information—from comparison data about different health insurance plans, to product recall data from the Food and Drug Administration, to epidemiological data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to scientific information from the National Institutes of Health, and much more. In the hands of developers, innovators, and entrepreneurs, these data are powering game-changing solutions, with much more on the way.

If you or your company has developed an application, service, or sensor fueled by health data, YOU could be featured at the fourth annual Health Datapalooza (HDP IV) on June 3 – 4, 2013, by applying here by April 5, 2013.

The Health Datapalooza is the biggest meeting of health data professionals, developers, entrepreneurs, government officials, venture capitalists, and investors in the Nation. Any developer or company that completes the application process will receive a discount code that reduces the cost of registration to attend.

Apply today to be part of Health Datapalooza IV—get exposure for your products and services, network with fellow innovators, and build connections that can help your company grow.

Site Tags:

API, Entrepreneur, Security Privacy

Publications 2.0: Enhancing Customer Experience

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 15:18:04 +0000

Kathryn Hambleton, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

SAMHSA’s publication distribution center maintains more than 1,000 science-based behavioral health publications and ships more than 13,000,000 products annually. The distribution of these publications is central to serving their mission and core audience. Recently, SAMHSA brought together new media technologies to better carry out this service, and their online presence for publications ordering has been transformed into the SAMHSA Store.

SAMHSA’s publications store
is available at store.samhsa.gov

Taking inspiration from Amazon.com, the SAMHSA Store delivers an engaging web-based “shopping” experience. The store features product categories to help visitors identify products that may interest them, including the 50 most popular products, recently added products, and a selection of featured timely publications.

The product pages (such as this National Suicide Prevention Lifeline magnet page) allow opportunities for shoppers to “Like” or “Tweet” about a given product, display tags to allow visitors to navigate to publications on similar products, and include the product’s intended audience. Each product page also includes a helpful section with both related products and relevant websites for additional information.

Delivering related websites is one way that the SAMHSA Store recognizes that not all products of value are items that can be ordered and shipped. In addition to websites, the site also shares other communication products with visitors, such as downloads, featured hotlines, and a locator for treatment centers. The store was also built with the flexibility to incorporate additional features such as ratings, commenting, and API development.

In more ways than one, the Store demonstrates that SAMHSA understands the needs of their customers and has used emerging technologies to adapt and improve the way those needs are met. SAMHSA is also continuing to improve the Store by soliciting feedback through various channels, including their Twitter and Facebook accounts as an extension of the customer service engagement.

Visit the SAMHSA Store
Read more about the project on GovLoop
Learn more about customer service in government

What can your agency do to improve the services delivered to your customers? Where does your agency look for inspiration?

Site Tags:

Minority Health, Social Media

#CorazonChat: Teaming up to promote heart health

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:08:55 +0000

Chelsea Perugini, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

To close out February’s American Heart Month, a group of HHS agencies banded together to execute our first bilingual Twitter chat to promote awareness of Latina heart health. Rather than hosting multiple events through multiple offices, each participating agency contributed to one coordinated, bilingual chat session. This strategy allowed us to pull resources from many different offices for the best possible discussion, while simultaneously embracing the Digital Strategy’s principle of using shared platforms to do more with less.

What is a Twitter chat?

A Twitter chat is a conversation on Twitter that uses a designated hashtag (#) as a way to sort and organize tweets. Others can follow the discussion on Twitter by using the same hashtag. We coordinated within HHS and teamed up with outside agencies to deliver an hour-long discussion. The Twitter chat was held on February 28^th using the hashtag #CorazonChat .

To make the chat available for future reference, we created a ‘story’ using Storify that allows you to look at the information provided during the chat at your leisure. This way, you can see the questions asked of us and our responses whenever you’d like.

What We Did

Before the Chat:

We chose to work in partnership with people and organizations that had a Spanish-speaking audience, like The US FDA’s Spanish Language Twitter .
We invited organizations to participate who we knew appealed to our intended audience, like Latina Magazine .
We asked individuals with large Latina bases of Twitter followers to engage in conversation with us, and their followers, during the chat.
We registered #CorazonChat on the health hashtag database, Symplur , to inform the health community about the chat.
We created a question and answer script to organize our partners. This gave everyone equal time during the chat to discuss their current initiatives and answer questions.

Results:

Hundreds of Twitter users participated in the chat.
There were more than 1,000 posts related to #CorazonChat .
Analytics show us that the largest demographic group that participated in the chat was females ages 25 – 34 years old, which was our target demographic.

“@hhslatino: Physical activity is good for your heart. How often should we be exercising? #corazónchat @american_heart” #dailywalks

— Jessica Sofia Valle(@JesSofiaValle) February 28, 2013

at least 150 minutes per week of moderate or 75 minutes per week of vigorous exercise bit.ly/YCstHO #corazonchat” @power2endstroke

— Pamela G. Johnson (@AHA_PGJohnson) February 28, 2013

Lessons Learned

Think about what you want participants to learn and what type of action you want them to take after the chat. Create Tweets in advance that represent this message.
Invite other departments/experts to join the chat that will be helpful in answering questions.
Clarify with other agencies/groups participating:
- What types of messages will you post?
- Will the messages they post match the point of view we want to convey?

If you do not know how to respond to something, redirect a participant to a .gov source that can answer their question.
Ask questions or re-tweet questions from others using the selected hashtag if you are not getting a lot of traffic.

For more Twitter chat best practices visit A Guide to Hosting a Twitter Chat.

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ASPR Fusion Roundtable: Innovation and Creativity in Public Health

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 14:16:35 +0000

Sara Harris, Management Analyst, ASPR Fusion Cell

The U.S. public health emergency response community spans 50 states, 16 territories, and multiple time zones. It encompasses government agencies, universities, non-governmental organizations, and private industry. It is, in a word, vast. With such an enormous network, it can be difficult to share innovative ideas and create a sense of community.

Enter the ASPR Fusion Roundtable. Launched in January 2013, this online community is a public forum for state, local, tribal, territorial, federal, and private sector stakeholders in the public health community. Roundtable participants can share ideas about public health situational awareness, emerging technologies, novel data sources for public health, and innovative data sharing and collaboration. This public forum allows individuals to provide insights that will help increase innovation and expand information sharing in the field of public health emergency preparedness. Community members can offer new ideas or give other users a pat on the back by voting up the inventive ideas of others. Discussions arise organically and are community-centric.

This coordinated approach to public health communications also leads to cost savings, a key aim of the Digital Government Strategy. The ASPR Fusion Roundtable arose out of a desire for people to be able to get together and share ideas in a time of limited travel funding. This community allows members to share ideas on their own time, from their own computers or tablets, closing the gap of hundreds of miles and hundreds of organizations.

The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) manages the system and regularly changes the conversation topic with new discussion topics, called campaigns. The first campaign is on the use of social media in public health emergency management. The second campaign will kick off soon and focus on the benefits and challenges of data sharing. Visit the ASPR Fusion roundtable to share your thoughts on either topic.

Contact us if you have any questions about the ASPR Fusion Roundtable. And don’t forget to follow @ASPRFusion on Twitter.

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Get “In the Know” on Social Media

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 15:16:04 +0000

CDC NPIN

Many federal agencies are choosing to use social media to help meet the goal of doing more with less. Why? Because social media tools offer free and easy pathways to reach out directly to the public. There are staff or contractor costs associated with operating them, of course, but the platforms themselves are no-cost and easy to use.

But how do you know if you’re using the right platforms? And are you using them to their full potential?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Prevention Information Network (CDC NPIN) is hosting a webcast series titled, “In the Know: Social Media for Public Health” to answer these questions. Each webcast will feature social media experts discussing how to use the latest tools for the greatest public health impact.

NPIN’s “In the Know” webcast series aims to celebrate the diversity and power of social tools. Over the next three months, these webcasts will provide basic information, tips, and hints on how public health organizations can use social media to promote public health and expand outreach initiatives. The webcasts will also provide a great opportunity to ask questions and learn from fellow public health practitioners. Use hashtag #SM4PH to follow along and ask questions on Twitter. You can also submit questions before or during the webcast to info@cdcnpin.org.

Each webcast begins at 2:00 p.m. (EST). Dates and topics include:

March 12 – LinkedIn and SlideShare
April 2 – Gaming and Mobile
April 23 – Facebook and Image Sharing (Instagram, Pinterest, and Flickr)
May 14 – Google+ and YouTube
June 4 – Social Media Measurement and Evaluation

Learn more and register for the upcoming webcast series. We look forward to your participation!

Follow @CDCNPIN and #SM4PH and help spread the word.

NOTE: This article was originally posting on the AIDS.gov Blog.

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HHSInnovations Awards Public Voting

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 17:38:14 +0000

Bryan Sivak, Chief Technology Officer

Public Voting is Now Closed

Last year, 18,000 people voted in Round 5 to choose the HHSinnovates People’s Choice Award winner. And now, we are proud to announce that public voting for Round 6 is open.

Building on the Digital Government Strategy’s principle of doing “more with less,” the HHSinnovates program requires us to think beyond the specific office or agency applicants work in to solve existing departmental level problems. The HHSinnovates program seeks to share new and interesting solutions developed by HHS employees to some of the most complex issues facing the health care industry.

The most fascinating aspects of HHSinnovates are hearing the stories from the individuals who decided to experiment and innovate--learning about their motivation and how they went about creating their solutions.

Take, for example, the story of one finalist from the 2012 competition. One day, on a morning run, Gwen Shinko, from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was thinking about how resources could be utilized more efficiently among the laboratories at NIAID. On her run, she had an idea: create an internal supply exchange that would facilitate the sharing of surplus equipment and supplies between laboratories. With her idea in mind, she rounded up an enthusiastic young scientist who had returned to school for an MBA and was looking for an interesting project, a developer, and a designer.

What resulted was called NIAID FreeStuff. Their idea not only resulted in economic savings and waste reduction, but is now being rolled out NIH-wide. In the first six months, the tool saved an estimated $30,000.

Interested in what inspired this year’s contestants? Visit the HHSinnovates Gallery to learn about their proposed solutions, including battling counterfeit drugs, combating obesity and Alzheimer’s disease, ensuring food safety, and better training our workforce.

From this fantastic pool of six finalists, only one will be chosen as the People’s Choice. Your vote can help choose the winner, so vote today!

Public voting begins today and runs through March 10, 2013. See two projects that are worthy of your vote? Feel like you just can’t decide which project is the best? Vote for both, or three, or five, if you think they’re all good. We just want you to let us know, by voting.

The winner will be announced at the HHSinnovates awards ceremony on March 19, 2013, at 11:00 a.m. EST and will be telecast on HHS Live Streaming.

Site Tags:

Minority Health, Social Media, Womens Health

Twitter Chat on Latino Heart Health

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 18:26:30 +0000

Nicholas Garlow, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

To conclude American Heart Month, HHS is bringing together a variety of partners to talk about Latino Heart Health, in a bilingual #CorazonChat ;on Twitter. In coordination with the HHS Office of Women’s health, American Heart Association, HHS Office of Minority Health, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and others, HHS will use@HHSLatino to host the Twitter event on Thursday, February 28th at 2:00 PM ET.

Who is Involved?

Moderator and host will be @HHSLatino.
Partners include @WomensHealth, @SaludDLaMujer, @American_Heart, @MinorityHealth, @US_FDA, @FDAenEspanol.

How can I participate?

You can RSVP to the Event and Share it on Facebook.
You can ask questions leading up the event and during the chat using#CorazonChat.

For More Information

Make the call. Don’t Miss a Beat. |Haga La Llamada.
Million Hearts offersSpanish-language resources and toolkits

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HHS.gov/DigitalStrategy Version 3.0

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Chris Bernstein, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

In January we told you how we made HHS.gov/DigitalStrategy mobile friendly. Putting the site in responsive design was the first significant update we made to the site since it launched in August 2012.

Today we’re happy to show you version 3.0, with updated landing pages and a new tagging system.

Landing Pages

This site’s structure aligns with the general principles of the Digital Government Strategy. This enables us to meet the Strategy’s requirement to report on our progress towards its milestones. However, we want the site to do more. We see HHS.gov/DigitalStrategy as an opportunity to highlight examples of best practices in digital communications across the Department.

As we’ve published content over the last six months, articles have fallen into five primary categories. These are what you see in the site’s main level navigation. While the blog serves as our editorial section, the first four sections—People First, Open Data, Mobile, and Working Better—are similar to the topic sections of a newspaper. Within each section, you can find different stories on that topic area, offering insights or best practice recommendations.

To reinforce the distinction between the four topic sections and the blogs, we’ve updated the landing pages to showcase all of the stories we offer on that topic. These updated landing pages show you what is going on in the people first, mobile, open data, and working better realm around HHS.

Developing a Tagging System

From Google Analytics, we learned that visitors are unlikely to enter the site from the homepage. Instead, visitors enter through a specific article or on the landing page of one of the site’s sections. Knowing this, we thought visitors would benefit from having easier access to related content. We achieved this by cross-connecting content with topic based tags.

After reviewing each article and blog post on the site, we found that content fell into 18 different categories. We used these categories to create individual tags, which we then assigned to each page. You can find the tags on the right under ‘Popular Topics.’ We offer a short description of the tag’s meaning on its specific page.

In addition, we’re using visualization software in the right rail of the site to weight the popularity of each tag based on the number of articles and blogs we have related to it. As you can see, at the time of this post, we’ve had a lot of ‘public engagement’ stories and fewer ‘Medicare’ items.

Users can also click the tags at the top of each article and blog to find related stories.

Future Development

We plan to use this site as a test bed for new ideas at HHS. Soon we will be launching improvements to our commenting system, which will allow you to post comments using your own names or pseudonyms, thumbs up ideas, and get email alerts so you can follow comments on a post.

What other features would you like to see us try out here?

Site Tags:

Content Strategy, Mobile Strategy, Social Media

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12 Big Ideas and Predictions for 2013

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 17:40:55 +0000

Anthony Calabrese, Web Manager HealthCare.gov, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

We saw some big changes across the federal government with the introduction of the Digital Government Strategy in 2012. And it was a big year for innovation at the Department of Health & Human Services, where I’m part of a great team that’s working to transform us into the digital age. Looking forward, 2013 promises to be even bigger!

My colleagues at the Digital Communications Division at HHS and the Federal Web Managers Council have teamed up to bring you 12 big ideas and predictions for 2013:

The result of a search query on
USAJobs.gov for positions with
"Social Media" in the job title.

Help Wanted: Community Manager, Social Media Manager, Social Media Strategist, Social Media Coordinator will become official titles for positions within the federal government. Why does this matter? The right social media team can react quickly and effectively in time of crisis and take advantage of a Super Bowl-sized opportunity on the fly.
2013 will be the year that ‘m-dot’ died. More web managers will move to responsive design for their websites or mobile apps for targeted content.
Not just responsive design. Responsive content too! Citizen engagement and better customer service will lead to a self-sustaining feedback loop that fuels constant iteration and constant site improvement.
At your service! The success of the Project MyUSA (formerly MyGov) will mean we are finally giving citizens the level of customization and personalization they’ve been getting for years from private sector services.
May I have your attention please? The use of rotating homepage billboards will continue regardless of their value or interest to the public.
AP… what? Structured content and “content as data” will be game changers. This year, everybody will finally understand what an API is and what it does .
#%@! Analytics and sentiment analysis will have a big impact on social media strategy in 2013 and beyond.
[INFOGRAPHIC] Infographics like this will grow in importance as a light, sharable, and printable alternative to video.
Here’s to your health! Health data will hit the mainstream as key parts of the Affordable Care Act kick in later this year. And HealthData.gov will exceed 500 open datasets.
Open Government: Open source platforms will continue to dominate as content management systems offer opportunities for collaboration across the federal government.
Git with the program! If you haven’t heard of GitHub , Twitter Bootstrap , and LESS CSS , you will by the end of 2013. They may change the way we do web.
Not just for zombies. Gamification, incentivization, and competition on social media platforms will help our content to go viral. Engagement – it’s not just for zombies anymore.

Let us know what you think and share your own ideas and predictions in the comments.Stay tuned for 12 more predictions coming soon…

Reblogged from the DigitalGov Blog.

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American Heart Month at HHS

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 17:41:08 +0000

Chris Bernstein, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

Heart disease is the number one killer in the United States. In fact, it claims the lives of more women than chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, and lung cancer combined.

February 1st marked the beginning of American Heart Month, a time to think about what you can do to take care of your heart.

HHS Sponsors American Heart Month

HHS is working to help Americans improve their heart health by raising awareness of heart disease with several programs around the Department:

Million Hearts aims to prevent 1 million heart attacks and strokes by 2017, by educating the public and health care professionals to fight heart disease and stroke.
The Heart Truth campaign aims to give women a personal and urgent wakeup call about their risk of heart disease. The centerpiece of The Heart Truth is the Red Dress, the national symbol for women and heart disease awareness, introduced in 2002 by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health.
First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move! initiative provides adults and children with resources and tips to make heart healthy changes in their lives.
HHS is also reaching out to Latinas with Haga La Llamada. ¡No Pierda Tiempo! , which builds on the Make the Call. Don't Miss a Beat campaign. This new Spanish-language campaign aims to educate and encourage Spanish-speaking women to call 911 when they or their mothers, sisters, or friends experience any symptom of a heart attack.

Using Social Media to Promote Heart Health

Consistent with the Digital Government Strategy, many programs are using social media in new and innovative ways to reach the public with heart-healthy information. This customer-centric approach to outreach allows the public to find helpful information anywhere, at any time, on any device. This also empowers those receiving these messages to share information with their own social networks, helping add trust and validity to the issue. The Heart Truth's activities this month include:

A Decade of Inspiring Women to
Protect Their Hearts. Text-only version
available at The Hearth Truth.

National Wear Red Day®, which supports the Red Dress as the national symbol for women and heart disease awareness. On the first Friday in February each year, women and men across the country unite in the national movement to give women a personal and urgent wakeup call about their risk of heart disease. Photos from this year's celebration were share with The Heart Truth on Facebook .
A heart health Twitter chat was held on February 1 ^st with BET Networks' CENTRIC, the American College of Cardiology (ACC), the U.S. Surgeon General, and The Heart Truth. The chat included information on how to maintain heart health, particularly in the African-American community and trended nationally.
The Heart Truth and partners Siempre Mujer, Discovery Familia, and the American Heart Association will hold a Spanish language Facebook chat on February 13 ^th to discuss women's heart health and heightened risks in the Hispanic community.
Pinterest promotion of heart-healthy tips through The Heart Truth's account in English and Spanish and through campaign partners.
Livestream of the Red Dress Collection ^SM 2013 Fashion Show on Facebook on Wednesday, February 6 ^th, at 7:00 PM ET. This event will feature celebrity participants and top fashion designers. Partners and celebrities will stream and comment on the event on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Text message outreach through ACC's free CardioSmartTXT SMS text messaging service.
A celebrity-sourced playlist on Spotify developed by The Fashion Spot to encourage physical activity.

Ways to Improve Your Heart Health

The good news for women and men is that most risk factors for heart disease—including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, physical inactivity, obesity, and smoking—are preventable and controllable. Controlling these risks could reduce your risk of a heart attack by 80%. That's why the Affordable Care Act is making preventive services—such as blood pressure and cholesterol screening, smoking cessation, and obesity counseling—more accessible and at no out-of-pocket cost to millions of Americans with private health insurance and those with Medicare.

To learn more about American Heart Month, heart disease, and prevention, please visit:

Also, share with your friends, family, and networks:

Follow @TheHeartTruth and @MillionHeartsUS on Twitter. Use #HeartTruth
Like The Heart Truth on Facebook.
Like Million Hearts on Facebook.

Site Tags:

Content Strategy, Social Media, Womens Health

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National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day Twitter Chat Tuesday 2/5

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 22:08:53 +0000

Chris Bernstein, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), along with its partners, will be hosting a Twitter event tomorrow, Tuesday, February 5, at 2pm ET, to commemorate National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day (NBHAAD), which takes place annually on February 7.

For the Twitter chat HHS has already asked for and received numerous questions. Staff will be answering these during the chat. This is an opportunity to hear from members of African American communities across the United States, subject matter experts, and other participants as they address specific questions about HIV and AIDS in African American communities.

For more information on the event, visit blog.AIDS.gov.

Join the chat by using the hashtag #NBHAADchat or follow @DrDeanCDC for the latest information on the chat.

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Minority Health, Social Media

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Top 10 Innovations of 2012

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 18:30:52 +0000

Chris Bernstein, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

2012 was a busy year for innovation at HHS. Hear from Bryan Sivak, Chief Technology Officer and Entrepreneur in Residence for HHS, as he lists the top 10 accomplishments in innovation at the Department. Accomplishments include the adoption of a Department-wide collaboration tool to the development of even more applications using healthdata.

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API, Entrepreneur

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Creating SEO-friendly Content

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 17:20:53 +0000

Katie Messner, Web Manager Usability.gov, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

Last week, we told you how search engines work. This week we’re going over creating useful and findable content. To be clear, the goal isn’t to write for search engines. The goal is to write for users. By putting people first and writing consumer-focused and accessible content, what you are producing is inherently search-engine friendly.

How to Write Useful and Findable Content

Writing useful and findable content is an integral part of any successful digital strategy. When creating content:

Focus content around tasks. Focus on your users’ questions and make sure that your site provides the answers. Use words and phrases that your users actually search for. You can identify user tasks by performing market research and analyzing both qualitative (usability task analysis, user feedback data) and quantitative data (metrics analysis). This type of research also will help you meet plain language requirements because your content uses the same wording that your users are.
Create meaningful “on-page” elements. On-page elements include but are not limited to titles, meta descriptions, filenames (URL), alt text, and sub-heads. By researching the terms that users use and implementing them in these areas, you can boost your rankings and increase click-through rates on a search engine results page (SERP). Remember that search engines and social media platforms may pull your site’s metadata as part of a SERP listing or post description. Be mindful of what you include in your meta tags.
Ensure content is original. Content duplicated from page-to-page or site-to-site confuses users and search engines see it as spam. Go through your content to ensure that each page has unique, original content. Search engines now penalize sites with thin content. Thin content includes content that is completely duplicated (true duplicate), mostly duplicated with few discrepancies (near duplicate), or pages that are full of structure with too little content on them (low unique ration). Well thought-out information architecture and cross-linking reduces the need to duplicate content.
Structure your site in an intuitive way. Users like simple layouts to navigate and find information; similarly, search bots do, too. Create an information architecture that is deep enough that content buckets are meaningful and not too broad, but shallow enough that finding desirable content doesn’t require too many clicks. In general, the more clicks it takes a user to get to desirable content, the lower search engines rank it. This means that search engines perceive content closer to the homepage as more valuable.
Build strong linking networks. Links from other sites to your content essentially act as references or endorsements in the eyes of search engines. When external sites use keywords in their link text, they are helping to build your authority for that keyword or phrase. The more authority that site has, the stronger the signal to the search engine that you’re an authoritative source. Beyond building authority, it’s also important to remember that linking fundamentally is how search bots crawl. In order for a search engine to crawl a page, there must be at least one link to it. Orphan pages (pages that aren’t linked to form another page) are not crawlable. Having a link in a sitemap to an orphan page may not be sufficient for search engines, either. Also, remember that search engines do not fill out forms, so not expect pages within a funnel to get crawled.
Keep content up-to-date. It is possible for old, evergreen content to rank high in the SERP because it has built its authority overtime as a go-to resource. However, freshness is now a factor. Maintaining fresh, up-to-date content is more desirable to users and therefore to search engines.
Make content sharable and engaging. The more your content is shared, the more links you build. Consider social platforms as content hubs; leverage them to drive traffic back to your site. Among other ways, you can create sharable content by having share buttons on your page, paying attention to metadata, and including visual elements throughout your content. Also, by creating ways for users to engage through commenting or rating your content, you help to build your authority. User comments often can help you rank for the longtail, which are specific, less competitive words and phrases that make up the bulk of search queries.

Following these tips should lead to user success and ultimately search engine optimization. Remember, keep the focus on users and business goals and mold your content strategy around that. What makes for a good user experience will be search-friendly.

Next week we’ll move on to measuring the effectiveness of the tips above by discussing how to actually measure SEO success.

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How Search Engines Work

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 15:23:29 +0000

Katie Messner, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

People want relevant information fast. They go to their computer–or, increasingly, their mobile device–do a quick search for the information they’re trying to find, quickly browse through the first page of links that comes up, and are on their way.

As of February 2012, PEW reported that 73% of Americans use search engines to find information. Because of this, search engine optimization (SEO) is a necessary part of your overall digital strategy. After all, if you have valuable content but users can’t find it, nobody wins.

So the question becomes: how do you create findable content? Web managers who follow user experience best practices by providing customer-focused content have a leg up on the competition.

Building a Search Engine Optimization Strategy

This is the first blog in our 3 part series on SEO. Through this serious, we hope to provide you with an understanding of

How search engines work
Writing SEO friendly content
Measuring SEO success

Getting Started: Understanding How Web Search Engines Work

In general, for content to appear in search results, it must be:

Published to the Web
Found by search engine crawlers (bots)
Indexed by search engine databases
Ranked in terms of relevance for each query based on a set of factors (an algorithm)
Searched for (queried) by a user

The user receives ranked results for their query on the search engine results page.

Major Search Engines: Similar, But Different

What sets search engines apart really comes down to step 5 above. To rank terms or phrases in order of relevance, search engines apply an algorithm to their process. An algorithm is a mathematical equation that calculates and assigns a value for any given webpage in relation to a given search term.

Although each company’s algorithm is technically unknown secret, so as to avoid competitors stealing one another’s algorithm and to prevent web managers from manipulating results, ranking factors typically focus on:

On-the-page factors like content relevancy, proper HTML elements marked-up, site architecture
Off-the-page factors like links, social signals, trust, authority
Not having violations (black hat SEO tactics) used
Not having bots blocked

Next week, we’ll discuss how you can use the know factors of the search process to write SEO friendly content. Check back with us soon for the next installment in this series.

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Entrepreneur, Mobile Apps, Public Engagement

Roll Up Your Sleeves, Get Involved, and Get Civic-Hacking

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 15:06:45 +0000

Brian Forde, Senior Advisor for Mobile and Data Innovation, U.S. CTO Nicholas Skytland, Program Manager, NASA’s Open Innovation Program

This is a cross-post from a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy blog.

Civic Hacking Day is an opportunity for software developers, technologists, and entrepreneurs to unleash their can-do American spirit by collaboratively harnessing publicly-released data and code to create innovative solutions for problems that affect Americans. While civic hacking communities have long worked to improve our country and the world, this summer will mark the first time local developers from across the Nation unite around the shared mission of addressing and solving challenges relevant to OUR blocks, OUR neighborhoods, OUR cities, OUR states, and OUR country.

National Day of Civic Hacking is a call to action for anyone who wants to make a positive impact on their town, city, and country. A coalition of leading organizations, companies, and government agencies have banded together to issue this challenge with the goal of promoting transparency, participation, and collaboration among governments, startups, and citizens. These partners will support Civic Hacking Day by hosting activities across the country that invite anyone to become part of the civic hacker community—whether you’re a newbie or an expert—and by connecting people in person or online during the weekend celebration.

The event is taking place in conjunction with Random Hacks of Kindness and Code for America‘s Brigade meetings and is being modeled after the Innovation Endeavors ’ Super Happy Block Party.

This is an opportunity for citizens in every town and city across the Nation to roll up their sleeves, get involved, and work together to improve our society by cultivating an ecosystem for innovation and change. Activities are already being planned in Augusta, GA; Alexandria, VA; Asheville, NC; Austin, TX; Bend, OR; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; Denver, CO; Detroit, MI; Grand Rapids, MI; Honolulu, HI; Lexington, KY; Oakland, CA; Palo Alto, CA; Portland, ME; Milwaukee, WI; New York City, NY; Philadelphia, PA; San Diego, CA; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA; and Tucson, AZ.

Ready to get involved in YOUR community? You can learn more about the National Day of Civic Hacking at: http://www.hackforchange.org/.

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New Electronic Health Record Design Contest Winners Announced

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:37:35 +0000

Ryan Panchadsaram, Presidential Innovation Fellow

Three months ago HealthIT.gov challenged graphic designers to help HHS reimagine what patient health records could look like. We hoped that by making a patient health record more user-friendly, we could help prevent medical errors, empower patients to make better health decisions, and even save lives. HeathIT.gov received a record number of submissions from graphic designers (more than 230). Reviewers and curators were inspired by how the entrants used design concepts to make the record more human-centered and easy to use.

Winning entry 'Nightingale'

What's special is that professionals (and students) inside and outside the health care industry participated in this graphic design contest to propose real solutions. Each one of them took the simple Blue Button text file and transformed it into something more useful for a patient, their family, and the people that care for them.

The Best Overall Design came from a group of graphic designers and strategists that work together at gravitytank in Chicago. Their entry--called Nightingale --beautifully displayed a person's medications and medical history that made it easier to understand.

You can see the passion for the design challenge in each of the submissions. Studio TACK , MedPop , Blue Button Narrative , and M. Jackson Wilkinson all submitted detailed entries that captured their thought process in redesigning the patient health record. The entries from Method , Josh Hemsley , and Andrew Conn explored how the health record adapts to different form factors, like print, computers, tablets, and smartphones. The teams behind hGraph and Health Summary weren't afraid to think outside of the box.

This challenge attracted graphic designers who can engineer too. Tony Webster and Vince Lane each built out their entries and submitted working prototypes.

HealthIT.gov put together a showcase of the winning design entries for all communities to admire and learn from. The reviewers also selected a set of entries that challenged the status quo and have included those in the showcase.

Keep following this effort because it is not over. What's happening next is exciting. The curators are going to select a final design (that may combine elements from various submissions) to be built and open-sourced on the code-sharing site GitHub . The objective is to build the Bootstrap framework for the new patient health record design. With these tools, electronic health record software companies across the country will be able to integrate the final design into their products and contribute to the open-source project.

Follow along at healthit.gov.

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Maps and Mapping at HHS

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:45:44 +0000

Kathryn Hambleton, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

The work of HHS impacts Americans all over the country. Displaying information on maps can demonstrate the relationship between sources of information, show off the great work your office is doing, and allow for people to quickly find information relevant to a particular locality. You can create basic maps that plot simple location points, or you can implement with more advanced features including regions with layered display options.

Get Started with Mapping

Mapping involves first and foremost having the geo-located data appropriately organized and exported in the right file type: Usually an XML or KML. Without getting into the technical weeds here, just know that a map can only be as good as the data behind it.

There are many 3rd-party technologies available for mapping. HHS has signed TOS-amendmentswith Socrata and ZeeMaps, thus clearing legal barriers to using those products. A TOS-amendment with MapBox is also in the works.

Who in HHS is using location?

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has used location-based data to display information from programs that are part of The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act.

The Community College Consortia comprises five regional groups of more than 70 member community colleges in all 50 states.
The Beacon Community Cooperative Agreement Program provides funding to selected communities to build and strengthen their health IT infrastructure and exchange capabilities.
The Health Information Technology Extension Program consists of Health Information Technology Regional Extension Centers(RECs).

AIDS.gov has created a HIV/AIDS prevention & service provider locator widgetusing data from multiple federal agencies. Check it out:

Find HIV/AIDS Prevention & Service Providers

Enter your address, city and state, or ZIP Code:

For more information on this widget, please visit AIDS.gov.

ATSDR is using location to organize the Public Health Assessments & Health Consultations according to the state or U.S. territory and also by the ATSDR regions where they originated.

These are only a few examples of mapping being used in this Department. Are there other mapping examples in HHS? What do you think are the biggest barriers to implementation?

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Now Open for Submissions: The Healthfinder.gov Mobile App Challenge

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 22:17:25 +0000

By: Chris Bernstein, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

It’s important to know where to get the latest, most reliable information when making decisions about your health. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) designed Healthfinder.gov to provide resources on a wide range of health topics, including resources from over 1,400 government and non-profit organizations.

While this information is useful online, it could be more useful in the palm of your hand. How do we get it there? We want your help to figure that out. HHS just launched a competition on Challenge.gov asking you—the public—to develop a mobile phone application for Healthfinder.gov.

About the Mobile Phone Application Challenge

As users of health care services, we invite you to join forces with developers and health professionals to design a mobile phone app that makes the Healthfinder.gov’s content customizable and easy to use. The mobile application should allow users to access and use Heathfinder.gov’s wealth of information on the go.

The mobile phone app needs to include the Quick Guide to Healthy Living topics and information about preventive services covered under the Affordable Care Act. The app could also include:

Myhealthfinder tool
Real-time communication tools to stay in touch with family and friends
Community health services/locators
News, analyses, and blogs from outside resources
Social media and online networking communities
Other related open source tools

Healthfinder.gov content syndication and API is provided at Healthfinder.gov’s content syndication page. The winning development team will be awarded a cash prize of $50,000 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Learn more about this opportunity and how to enter at Challenge.gov.

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Usability.gov: Tell Us What You Really Think

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:28:43 +0000

Katie Messner, Web Manager Usability.gov, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

As we begin our redesign of Usability.gov, it is our mission to make it the leading resource for user experience guidelines and best practices. The website redesign will ensure that the site stays credible and timely, while still providing some reference material that remains applicable over time.

We plan to follow the same usability best practices and methods outlined throughout the site and share our progress and lessons learned with you as we go.

We’re Open to Your Feedback

To provide useful tools, content, and guidance, we need your help. We’re looking for your feedback and are open to the responses we receive.

We‘ve created a user feedback survey for the site to easily gather your thoughts and suggestions. Our goal is to:

Learn what works on the site
Determine what you would like to see changed or added

Please take the survey and tell us what you think. This survey will be available until January 1, 2013, but make it your resolution to respond today.

You can also join the conversation by commenting below. Talk to us on Twitter using hashtag #UsabilityReboot and follow @UsabilityGov to learn more about the redesign.

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New Tool to Protect Health Privacy on Mobile Devices at HHS

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 19:18:38 +0000

Chris Bernstein, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

Health records are open to potential risks when health care providers and organizations use laptops, tablets, and smartphones to view or update patient records. However, research shows that only 44% of survey respondents and surveyed organizations encrypt the data on their mobile devices. And according to a recent study, less than half of the surveyed health care organizations discuss ways to protect mobile devices in privacy training.

Worried About Using a Mobile Device for
Work? Here's What to Do

To address the issue of data security in an increasingly mobile digital environment, HHS launched HealthIT.gov, which provides guidance and support to protect health information. Called “Your Mobile Device and Health Information Privacy and Security,” this site provides:

Resources such as videos, fact sheets, and downloadable posters to educate health care providers and organizations about protecting and securing health information against potential risks
Frequently asked questions that offer solutions to common issues, including how to respond when a mobile device is stolen and safeguarding health information while using public wifi
Actions health care providers and organizations can take to determine their mobile device security needs and develop and implement appropriate device policies and procedures

Through education and simple measures health care providers and organizations can greatly reduce the risk to health information.

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Using Technology to Improve Prescription Medication Use

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 17:31:33 +0000

Chris Bernstein, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

Taking prescription medications as directed can improve health and quality of life, especially for people with cardiovascular disease or diabetes. But patients don’t always follow directions, and it is becoming a public health issue. People often:

1^st place winner Remind Me Again

Do not fill prescriptions when they’re needed
Stop using medications before they should
Take less of the medication than directed
Split pills
Skip doses

The New England Journal of Medicine reports that not following the instructions on prescription medications can lead to new health problems. In fact, patients who do not follow their medication’s instructions have a 50-85% higher mortality rate than those who do.

Through the Managing Meds Video Challenge, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology invited the public to submit short videos sharing how technology can help people manage their prescription medications effectively and improve health and safety.

The winners all show different uses of health technology—from smartphones to the Web—to help them remember to take their medications. The top three entries and the popular choice award all received cash prizes.

Watch all the winning videos at Challenge.gov.

You can follow the sponsor of the contest on Twitter at @ONC_HealthIT or use #ManageMeds to join the conversation.

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Super Early Bird Registration for Health Datapalooza 2013 Now Open!

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:25:03 +0000

Chris Bernstein, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

Registration for the Health Data Initiative Forum IV: Health Datapalooza is now open! Now, through December 21, 2012, take advantage of the super early bird registration. Next year’s event will be held June 3^rd and 4^th 2013.

Health Datapalooza IV is the fourth annual national conference born from government efforts to liberate health data and addresses the effective use of health data by companies, startups, academics, government agencies and individuals.

The two-day event includes:

Keynote presentations, newsmaker panels, breakout groups, training sessions, meet-ups, code-a-thons, and other interactive sessions focused on health data applications.
Rapid-fire announcements of business deals, data competitions, new academic programs and projects, cross-sector collaborations, and other opportunities for engagement.
An “Apps Expo” which allows attendees to explore innovative new tools and services, and interact directly with the developers and data experts who create the applications.

The hallmark of the event is a national competition that searches for the best and most innovative uses of health data in apps and products and that culminates in live demonstrations of the winning applications to Forum attendees.

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HHS CTO Bryan Sivak Talks Health Data on NPR

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 21:41:14 +0000

Chris Bernstein, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

HHS Chief Technology Officer Bryan Sivak was featured in yesterday's Kojo Nnamdi Show in an hour-long segment entitled, "Liberating (And Protecting) Health Data."

You can listen to the full segment in which Bryan was featured on the program’s website, transcript here .

Key quote: “In a lot of ways, we are trying to act as a catalyst or an enabler for this sort of sea change in health IT. There are any numbers of departments that work on various aspects of this, and it's everything from encouraging doctors to pick up health technology, to implement electronic medical record systems, all the way through to enabling patients to access their data in a machine-readable and seamless format.” – HHS CTO Bryan Sivak

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Mobile Apps, Security Privacy

Glad You Asked: Making PubMed Mobile

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 21:51:10 +0000

Chris Bernstein, Digital Communications Division, HHS

On several of our posts, we’ve asked you to tell us what information you’d like to see optimized for mobile devices.

Recently, four commenters asked for the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) popular PubMed tool to be made mobile-friendly. The good news is it already is—in two different ways!

PubMed application for iOS

The PubMed mobile site allows you to search the same 22 million citations you can access on the desktop site from your mobile browser. You do the same thing using PubMed mobile applications for iOS and Android smartphones.

We like that NLM chose to create both a mobile site and an app version.

In this case, the staff at the NLM wanted to offer the wealth of information available through PubMed in a quick and accessible format for mobile users. They weren’t trying to add additional functionality to the mix, just bring this popular tool to the palm of your hand.

To access the mobile site, just search for ‘pubmed’ in the browser of your smartphone and you will be redirected to the stripped-down mobile version.

For those who use PubMed more often, you can quickly access the tool through the downloadable app. This can save time otherwise spent navigating to the website.

This dual approach allows NLM to meet the needs of two kinds of users. Frequent users can rely on their app and infrequent users can use the tool through the mobile site. It’s a win-win!

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Glad You Asked, Mobile Strategy

Beyond Web Metrics – Taking a Broader View

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 20:24:46 +0000

Andrew Wilson, SAMHSA Office of Communications

At SAMHSA, our Web improvement efforts center around a “customer first” approach in everything we do. Much of our recent work focused on understanding how information on the agency’s website should be organized and prioritized.

How are we doing this? A variety of tools and techniques are helping us meet this goal, such as directly soliciting feedback from customers via comments and card sorting exercises, using trending social media stories to identify what issues may be of greatest interest to SAMHSA customers, and examining website metrics to find out which website features are our customers’ favorites.

Understanding Web metrics using measurement tools like Google Analytics or Webtrends helps uncover what visitors find most and least useful on our website. When paired with usability testing, surveys, or direct feedback, Web metrics guide how we deliver information to our customers effectively.

But Web metrics can’t tell us everything, so we don’t stop there. To ensure we’re delivering the most relevant information for our visitors, we must keep in mind that site placement often drives clicks—even if that information is not what visitors may need the most. Pages linked from the homepage often have the highest click-through rates, giving the impression that this is the most popular content. However, it may be that the prominent placement of this content allows visitors to more easily locate and visit them.

Search engines add another level of complexity to interpreting Web metrics. Google, Bing, and others drive more visitors to webpages linked from a website’s homepage than to pages not connected to the homepage directly. In SAMHSA’s case, this may mean that greater numbers of people are finding pages on SAMHSA.gov because those pages are linked to from the website homepage, not necessarily because visitors are more interested in those particular pages. Taking a deeper dive into our Web metrics allows us to properly analyze visitor trends and page popularity in more depth, providing us with the whole picture of visitors’ interests.

We know our information is only as good as the ease with which it’s accessed. To that end, we’re always thinking about sorting out these potential data biases and understanding how the data is being provided. In our case, we’re leveraging many different datasets simultaneously to ensure we have a full picture of what our customers like and what they need.

Be sure to look for more about our use of these tools and methods in upcoming posts.

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StopBullying.gov Video Challenge Calls on Public to Cast Their Vote

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 18:13:51 +0000

Katie Gorscak, Digital Communications Division, HHS

Youth from around the country and those overseas in U.S. Department of Defense schools, aged 13 to 18 years, took our challenge and submitted almost 900 entries for the 2012 StopBullying.gov Video Challenge!

The Federal Partners in Bullying Prevention have worked our way through all the creative videos and screened them for eligibility based on the challenge rules. We ranked each of the eligible videos according to the published criteria, and considered feedback from our technical advisers:

Filmmaker Lee Hirsch
Alice Cahn from Cartoon Network’s Stop Bullying, Speak Up! Campaign
Deborah Leiter from the Ad Council
Scott Hannah and Tyler Gregory, previous finalists of The Great American NO BULL Challenge

We are ready to share the SEVEN finalists for YOU to vote on!

The theme of this year's contest is “how youth can be more than a bystander and help kids who are involved in bullying.” Contestants were asked to integrate this idea into their entries and show how they are making a difference in their communities by taking action against bullying.

The goal of the contest is to create an impact through accepting videos that demonstrate:

Peer-to-peer communication;
Positive messaging; and
Promotion of the http://www.stopbullying.gov website

These youth are competing for big cash prizes—$2,000 will be awarded to the winning video and $500 for each of the two runners up. Voting will continue until December 10^th.

We encourage you to look over the entries and vote for the video that does the best job of showing how youth can be more than a bystander and truly make a difference in their communities by standing up against bullying.

Vote in the video challenge!

When you're done, you can jump over to Twitter or Facebook and tell your friends to vote, too.

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Updating with the Times: Hello from the new Digital Communications Division

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 21:23:34 +0000

Prudence Goforth, Director, Digital Communications Division

I’m delighted to announce a significant milestone in the evolution of the Department’s communications efforts: Effective today, ASPA’s Web Communications and New Media Division becomes the Digital Communications Division.

Why change our brand?

When I came to HHS in 2006, it was to head the Web Communications Division. We essentially built and managed websites for the Department.

HHS’s web outreach grew, and so did we. We started adding audio, then video. Then came Facebook and Twitter. And so we launched the Center for New Media, and became the Web Communications and New Media Division.

Now we see mobile exploding onto the scene. Just this September, Facebook reported that more than half of its one billion active users were using Facebook on tablets and smart phones. Mobile use of our sites is growing 20-30% a year. PayPal reported yesterday that financial transactions on mobile devices increased 120% this holiday weekend over last year.

This year brought the new Digital Strategy, memorializing principles we’ve embraced for a long time. We now create sites using responsive design. We’re transitioning to more open source tools and platforms. We’ve began creating APIs to make our data easy for others to use. We moved to the cloud.

So we considered renaming ourselves again to reflect all we do. Someone suggested we become the Web, Social Media, Mobile, Open Source, and API Division (WSMMOSAD?). How silly would that be?

Instead, we decided to go right to our foundation: Digital—the common thread that unites all of our efforts across platforms, tools, and technologies.

And so, starting today, we become: The Digital Communications Division (DCD).

It will some take time to officially make the change. But as we know, change is fast these days—and inevitable. We think this new name positions us well for the future, whatever it throws at us.

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Recreating the Home of User Experience

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 18:26:38 +0000

Richard Stapleton, Deputy Director, Web Communications and New Media Division

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is launching a project to redesign Usability.gov—the federal website which provides guidelines, tools, and resources to make websites more usable and accessible to the public. We’re doing this to expand usability to cover new and social media and mobile web design, as well as to engage students and professionals in the User Experience (UX) and Web communities, Web designers and Web content managers.

Since the site was last revised in 2009, the online landscape has changed dramatically. Best practices have changed, mobile experience has grown in importance, and social media has exploded.

This redesign includes:

New and updated content
A refreshed interface
An updated and easier to navigate information architecture
Renewed social media and outreach activities
A library of templates, resources, methodology examples, and best practices for UX and Web professionals
New opportunities for user engagement and information sharing

With these updates, the Usability.gov aims to:

Continue its role in modeling best UX practices across all platforms
Become a resource for students and professionals to grow and expand their knowledge of UX best practices
Serve as the home of active UX conversation, exploration, and learning
Provide access to formal research and writings
Showcase examples of great UX and the processes for achieving them

As HHS’s Web team enters the planning phase of Usability.gov’s redesign, we want *your* input on how to make it even better. In the coming weeks, we will post a user feedback survey to get your initial input. Moving forward, we will organize focus groups and post polls, as well as request your feedback for designs and features on Usability.gov.

How can we make Usability.gov more useful to UX practitioners and others in the Web community?

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New Technologies for Web Usability Testing

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 17:32:33 +0000

Richard Stapleton, Deputy Director, Web Communications and New Media Division

HHS has a long history of conducting user tests of our websites to improve the user experience. Our two fully equipped usability laboratories are in constant use, testing not only HHS websites but conducting test for other departments across the federal community.

The increased use of mobile platforms, from tablets to smart phones, created new challenges for usability testing. Specifically, how do we record swipes and finger tips on a handheld device? Why, turn to the Web, of course, and soon enough we identified several promising gadgets. We selected two of the more promising; to find out how they measure up, read the results of our testing.

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HHS Launches Tobacco Free Website Using Digital Strategy Best Practices

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 18:23:38 +0000

Karen Silver, Web Communications and New Media Division, HHS

Today we launched BeTobaccoFree.gov. This site brings together the best tobacco-related information from across HHS. It’s done in the spirit of the Digital Government Strategy, providing consumers with one-stop access to more than 120 different collections of tobacco-related web content from across the federal family. In addition, more than 100 redundant or outdated websites are being taken down as part of this effort.

Some key features of the site:

We conducted extensive usability testing to make sure information is well organized and straightforward. The site is not organized by which agency or program provided the information. It’s structured around how users naturally search for information and resources. Feedback is collected daily through our Voice of Consumer survey tool. We’ll use the data to make continuous site improvements.

Infographic text-only version

The material is presented in a range of formats, including text, video, audio, and infographics. This allows visitors to use several learning methods. Infographics convey a lot of knowledge in a little space. This is one of the infographics on the health benefits of quitting smoking. See how clearly the message comes across?

In keeping with the Digital Government Strategy, BeTobaccoFree.gov is mobile-friendly. The site was built using responsive design, meaning it resizes automatically to any screen size, from desktop to tablet to smartphone.

The website’s social media dashboard, “Say it—Share it,” offers real-time updates from HHS tobacco-related social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, and other platforms.

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Glad You Asked: Digital Strategy Basics

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 20:10:18 +0000

Richard Stapleton, Deputy Director, Digital Communications Division, by Kasia Galica of the National Cancer Institute

Mobile devices, social media, and the storage options offered by cloud computing has completely changed how we work with information. The Federal Government is working to meet these new expectations by delivering information and services anytime, anywhere and on any device. Many of you have left questions and comments on this site asking how we’re doing this. We’d like to answer a few of those questions here, now.

Question: What is the HHS Digital Strategy, exactly?

Response: The HHS Digital Strategy aims to “free the data” by improving the public’s ability to get information, whenever and however they need it. This effort encompasses all of the traditional topic-specific ‘.gov’ websites. It also includes all forms of data sharing, communication, social media, and third party application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow for mashups —all the while recognizing the growing usage of smart phones and tablets for the flow information. Instead of focusing on processes to improve information technology (IT), the Digital Strategy focuses on 3 outcomes:

Enable the American people and an increasingly mobile federal workforce to access information and services anywhere, anytime, on any device.
Deliver digital services to the American people smartly, securely, and affordably.
Unlock the power of government data to spur innovation.

The overarching goal is to present information for consumers in a way that is fully accessible to them, written in plain language, and brought together in ONE portal.

A Google search on a health topic yields thousands of hits—each one of which can only present a piece of the total picture. Right now the public is playing Where’s Waldo? with health information. Our end goal is to create comprehensive topic-based websites that are available in traditional and mobile formats. These sites will offer pertinent, reliable, and accurate information in one place.

Question: Can you give me some examples?

Response: One of the great success stories is flu.gov which deals strictly with influenza, the flu virus. When H1N1 hit and eventually turned into a pandemic, flu.gov was already up and running. We had all the information in one convenient place when the evening news, online news sites, and newspapers began covering the flu and its spread extensively. The content was there and the traffic to the site was extraordinary. Flu.gov proved its worth at this time because the site served as a central source for flu-related information. This showed us how important the topic-based approach that spawned the site was.

Another example is foodsafety.gov. This cooperative website brings together food safety information, recalls, and alerts across HHS, USDA, and FDA all in one convenient place. Accessible from a smart phone or tablet, you can get the latest updates on pertinent food safety issues such as the recent salmonella outbreak in peanut butter whenever you need it.

Question: What’s the big deal? Why is the Government Digital Strategy so hard to implement?

Response: It’s a complicated process. For example, we’re working on launching a topic specific website on tobacco by the end of the year. We came up with an inventory of 1,100 websites all related to smoking: how-to quit, the health effects of smoking, how-to not start smoking. You name it, it’s out there. Not only is there countless information, it also spans a number of major divisions across the federal government. To scan and pull all that information into one platform is a major undertaking requiring the coordinated efforts of many stakeholders on the project.

Question: How will this effect health related research?

Response: With this initiative we take data and research that we have and make it publically available in a format that is not only readable but usable by data and technology innovators for relevant mashups. Using an application programming interface (API), the data can be accessed, applied to population or mapping tables, and presented to create new relevant information or create new opportunities for further research. Making the data available for developers, researchers, and organizations pushes innovation forward and helps to highlight gaps in research.

Question: What are the benefits?

Response: Specifically valuable to us internally is that we can weed out inconsistencies amongst the information scattered across the internet. We find that for whatever reason, some websites have different information. It may be that the content was written at different times and hasn’t been updated to match the knowledge that is available now. Finding inconsistent information can be frustrating, misleading, and potentially health-threatening for the consumer. The HHS Digital Strategy seeks to synthesize all the information and deliver the right information to the consumer in a consistent manner.

We also reach out to the public to give us feedback on how to improve the Government Digital Strategy and ensure we’re reaching our intended goals. We have a very interactive blog and pursue an active dialogue on the comments we receive.

Question: What are the next steps?

Response: We’ve had a great start to this initiative and will continue to engage consumers—utilizing their opinions and feedback to reach our end goals.

I like to use a supermarket model to explain the current state of affairs of information on the web. When you go into a supermarket you can expect that the groceries will be organized by the product, regardless of the manufacturer. If you’re looking for cereal, you know that one aisle will have all the cereal—it doesn’t matter if it’s made by Kellogg or General Mills, or whomever. Right now it’s like a trailer of grocery cargo dumped all the boxes of food on the highway and we have to sort through it ourselves. People shouldn’t need to know who owns the information on tobacco, food safety, the flu, bullying, or cancer. That information should be grouped together in one reliable place and easily accessible on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smart phone. We’re working to make that possible.

Still have question about the Digital Strategy? Comment below and tell us what you think.

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Glad You Asked

Digital Strategy Meets Content Strategy

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 17:46:12 +0000

Craig Stoltz, Content Team Leader, Web Communications & New Media Division/HHS

It’s easy to read the Digital Government Strategy and think it’s all about the technology—all that talk about open source platforms, joint purchasing agreements, APIs, security and privacy. But the document also has huge implications for those of us who work on the content side of the shop.

On the content team at HHS’s Web Communications Division, we’ve launched “Digital13,” a project designed to make sure our content strategy is in line with the Digital Government Strategy. Here are some early thoughts about what alignment with the strategy means for us:

Make all content mobile-ready. This means using plain language and creating content using the “inverted pyramid” style (put the important stuff first). It means using bullets, lists, and clear subheads whenever possible. It may mean using a “bite/snack/meal” approach, so small-screen scrollers can get the gist quickly, pick up key details fast, and dig into the whole enchilada only if they want to. Happily, this style serves desktop users better too. It’s what web content should have been all along.
Rethink images based on mobile and metrics. Those snazzy rotating billboards: Do metrics show they work? How will they play in mobile environments? What about those “We want more images on the page just to break things up” flourishes? On the other hand, lightweight infographics can explain a lot in a little space, and may make yards of wordage unnecessary. The Digital Government Strategy presents an opportunity—no, an obligation—to revisit your visual approach.
Organize content around topics and language that make sense to users, not the organization that produces it. Nobody cares which unit produced the report. Put all the reports on the same topic together, regardless of who produced them, so users will find them in one spot. Don’t label a tab “Acquisition Policies.” Try “Getting Contracts,” and present the content as a how-to. That’s probably what site users want.
Quit thinking “webpages.” Think about chunks of tagged content that can be used in lots of different environments—mobile devices, responsive design layouts, social media, APIs, RSS feeds, etc. And, of course, webpages.
Use feedback to improve your content. You must have a process for using performance data--from metrics, surveys, usability testing, focus groups, and so on—to improve your content. This should not be an annual or a blue-moon redesign effort. It should be continuous, an organic part of your workflow.

That’s just the beginning, but it’s already a pretty disruptive start. We’ll keep you posted on how things go throughout the year we’re calling Digital13. You do the same.

What changes are you making to your content operation to align with the Digital Government Strategy?

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Introducing assets.cms.gov

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 11:38:15 +0000

Jon Booth Director, Website & New Media Group, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

Have you heard about assets.cms.gov? Probably not, but if you work on or use CMS' websites, it is a tool you use every day.

The Web & New Media Group (WNMG) started building assets.cms.gov about 10 months ago and completed the full launch of the site as part of the Medicare.gov redesign on August 21, 2012.

assets.cms.gov represents a shared code library for all of CMS' public websites. As websites (ours and everyone else's!) have grown in complexity over the past decade, they have come to be built on many common code and image libraries. These include the following file types:

Website headers & footers
Javascript libraries
CSS (stylesheet) files
Shared images
HTML snippets

Many of these files are developed by CMS and/or contractors, but there are also many common code libraries used across almost all commercial and Federal websites these days. Common libraries used by CMS include:

jQuery
Twitter Bootstrap
YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library)

By placing all of these common code files onto assets.cms.gov, we can use the same code across all of CMS' websites. assets.cms.gov supports both a global directory of assets used across all websites as well as folders for site-specific code libraries (e.g., www.cms.gov, www.medicare.gov, etc.).

Some of the benefits of this approach include:

The ability to cache files across all of CMS' websites, resulting in better website performance
The ability to release new versions of code libraries across all websites at once
A common set of code built & tested to Section 508 compliance and cross-browser performance

I've mentioned how WNMG is using assets.cms.gov to support development of the public websites, but any CMS web-based project can be built against the assets.cms.gov framework. Using assets.cms.gov for your web project gains you all of the benefits above and also saves you development time by leveraging the work that has already been done.

assets.cms.gov Documentation & Downloads are available online. We are continuing to iterate and grow the amount of documentation online, so please check back frequently.

If you are interested in using assets.cms.gov for a web development project you are working on, please let us know in the comments. We are happy to address any questions you have or to provide additional information. Your feedback will help make this project better!

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API, Medicare

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Health 2.0 Developer Challenge Award Winners

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 17:53:34 +0000

Chris Bernstein, Web Communications and New Media Division, HHS

HHS held an Innovation Challenge and patients were the winners!

Winners for the Blue Button Mash-Up Challenge and the EHR Accessibility Module Challenge were announced last week during the Health 2.0 Sixth Annual Fall Conference in San Francisco.

The first Challenge required applicants to ‘mash up’ Blue Button data with other open health data and information. “Blue Button” data is personal health information a patient can download through their health plan, doctor, or hospital.

The second Challenge asked solvers to create and test a tool that makes it easy for people with disabilities to access and interact with the health data stored in their electronic health records (EHR).

The Blue Button winner, iBlueButton , submitted by Humetrix of San Diego, is a dual-app system. The Patient version provides an intuitive, secure solution consumers can use to connect to their Blue Button and other health records. The Physician version transmits in-app generated Visit Summaries or Patient Records using Push technology to the patient. iBlueButton includes features such as patient-optimized and physician-optimized displays and dashboards, medication look-up, and new tools to download or print health information.

Diagram of iBlueButton Patient and Physician app relationship

The EHR Accessibility winner, Pinaxis, created Apollo, is a fully accessible Internet portal that will allow patients to interact with any provider’s existing EHR system over the Web. Apollo’s patient portal is designed to enhance the user experience for patients, which is currently plagued by serious accessibility concern hindering use by people of diverse disabilities, including those who have vision, hearing, intellectual, manual dexterity, mental health, developmental and other types of disabilities. This tool is currently being tested as a prototype; more information can be found with the Pinaxis Medical Group .

The challenges are part of ONC's Investing in Innovation program which utilizes prizes and challenges to encourage innovation. The goal of these challenges is to obtain solutions to intractable health IT problems. A list of past winners of ONC challenges can be found here. Aligned with the administration’s innovation agenda, i2 is the first federal program to operate under the authority of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, signed into law by President Obama on Jan. 4, 2011. For details, see http://www.health2challenge.org/category/onc/ .

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Glad You Asked, Mobile Strategy, Social Media

Glad You Asked: Information on Smartphones and Social Media

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:56:26 +0000

Richard Stapleton, Deputy Director, Web Communications and New Media Division

So we are making information more accessible on Smartphones and Social Media, how does this help me if I don’t use these technologies? Several have asked us such questions.

Comment:

I have neither a "smart phone" or a Tablet. I am 70 yrs. of age and "home bound", I have a normal dumb new cellphone, I also have a MacPro Desktop Computer. I spend all day on this computer doing important things.

Medicare is very important, it is astounding that so called smart phones are being catered to, and astounding to me that now that includes such importance regarding anything Medicare! I did not read that Mac's were mentioned above. Anyone who bothers to even read these comments need to know so called Smart Phones are not safe, and totally inappropriate for information regarding Medicare. So what is coming soon for all of those like myself? As for Social Media, nothing important should ever use the so called Social Media. We are in a time where hackers already are doing well. Social Media for all important things is totally inappropriate.

My mind is totally fine, please get some sense and do not use either Social Media or Cellphones. Your wonderful new plan is quite Scary!

Comment:

I find the web articles invaluable. I do not use Twitter. It's on my iPhone, but being a baby boomer I have never been shown how to use it effectively. I know technology is rapidly inserting itself into emergency management and public health, but many of us seasoned vets haven't fully embraced it.

Comment:

The government shouldn't require us to use social media in order to comment on health care programs.

We should have reliably neutral information on choosing health care programs

Response:

The mobile friendly updates we’ve made to Medicare.gov and Cancer.gov don’t mean new information can only be accessed on a smartphone. The great information that is on these traditional desktop sites can now just be viewed quicker and easier on smartphones. We have not separated the information by any means. We are working to bring that information to the broadest audience possible, so we’re making it viewable across all platforms. Designing a website so it can be viewed well on a desktop computer, table, smart phone, and anything else in between just means we’re optimizing the great content on that one site for all users. This actually saves the government money by not requiring us to double and triple efforts based on specific technologies.

The same can be said for our moves into social media. Offering “Twitter Townhalls” and Trending Illnesses in Social Media doesn’t mean that this information is only accessible in these formats. If you have a question about bullying, you can still call the StopBullying helpline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) . If you have questions about trending illnesses around the country, you can still get that information from the CDC. We are just offering new opportunities to talk with subject matter experts across the digital landscape. This doesn’t mean traditional avenues are no longer available.

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Bring Your Own Data: Opportunities and Challenges in Using Citizen-Generated Data

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:35:14 +0000

Sara Harris, Fusion Cell, Office of the Asst. Secretary for Preparedness and Response, HHS

Have you ever reported traffic congestion or an accident to the local radio station or a smartphone app? Have you measured snow or rain fall for your local TV station? These are basic types of citizen-generated data.

Emergency health response agencies, including the HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), already uses citizen-generated data passively collected through social media channels like Twitter to track trending illnesses. At ASPR, we want to learn more about other applications of citizen-generated data and how this data can help us understand what is going on in a community following a disaster. Why are citizens participating in other projects? What is the quality of the data that is reported? What challenges or limitations exist when using citizen-generated data?

As we discussed this concept with colleagues at other agencies we quickly realized we weren’t the only ones interested in learning more. So, with our federal agency partners and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we will be hosting a day-long forum Nov. 14, in the Washington, DC area entitled: “Bring Your Own Data: opportunities and challenges in using citizen-generated data for situational awareness.”

This event is open to anyone who may have an interest in citizen-generated data. Whether you’re a part of academia or the government, an environmentalist or epidemiologist, we’d love to see you there!

During the forum, we’ll hear about and discuss how citizens have contributed to studies, the value citizen-generated data has brought to projects, and the lessons learned through citizen involvement. At the end of the forum, we hope to have a better understanding of the challenges to using data provided by citizens, ideas for overcoming the challenges and limitations, and how this data can be used for situational awareness.

The event will include discussion and panel presentations on the following topics:

Transforming Research with Passive Citizen Data
Bring Your Own Data—Participatory Data Collection
Building Situational Awareness With Passive and Participatory Data
ASPR Challenge Competition Winner Announcement
What can we learn from citizens generating ecological data?
What can we learn from citizens sharing genomic and personal data?
How Federal Agencies and Federal Partners are Using Citizen-Generated Data

For more information and to participate in the forum, visit the registration page. If you have any questions about the forum please feel free to contact fusion.info@hhs.gov.

What kinds of citizen-gathered information is available and how would you suggest using it?

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API, Entrepreneur, Public Engagement

Round Five of HHSinnovates Concludes: Lessons Learned

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 14:02:24 +0000

Gregory Downing, D.O., Ph.D.Executive Director for Innovation for the Immediate Office of the Secretary at HHS

On Monday September 24, 2012 Secretary Sebelius announced the winners of the fifth round of the HHSinnovates Program and the winner of the first ever “People’s Choice Award”. For this competition, we saw projects initiated by numerous offices and agencies across the Department.

HHSinnovates People’s Choice Award winners from NIOSH

For the first time ever, the HHSinnovates Program featured a “People’s Choice Award”, in which all six finalists were showcased for public voting. The results were astronomical; nearly 18,000 votes were cast and more people than ever before were exposed to the great innovations led by HHS employees in collaboration with our partners. The three projects selected as the Secretary’s picks were the Food and Drug Administration’s 100,000 Genome Project, the Health Resources and Services Administration’s National Health Service Corps Jobs Center, and the Center for Disease Control’s Coal Dust Explosibility Meter. In addition to being a Secretary’s pick, the Coal Dust Explosibility Meter was selected for the first ever People’s Choice Award. The Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Thomas Friedan, personally accepted this award on behalf of his agency. The three projects that were honorable mentions are the Indian Health Services’ Online Food Handler Training Project, the National Institutes of Health’s RePORT, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ (NIAID) Free Stuff.

In consultation with innovators, important and interesting lessons learned were identified.

Fail and fail fast – Fail? A concept not usually embraced in government, but the HHSinnovates program encourages risk-taking and the innovative spirit. As noted at the awards ceremony by Dr. Thomas Friedan, “Fail early and fail often so long as we know we’re failing so we can adjust our way of working because ultimately we are going to be successful by getting that feedback loop and iteratively improving the effectiveness of our work. Innovation is about continuous improvement.” A key strategy used by many of our innovation teams was to divide their projects up into phases and to test out each phase as quickly as possible in order to discover the “failures” and correct them as expeditiously as possible.

Persistence Pays Off – There were six finalist teams in the fifth round HHSinnovates, out of an initial pool of 62 nominations; some of those submissions were from applicants who had previously submitted their project. Those who resubmitted solicited input from the review team and improved their submissions and worked with others in their agency.
Don’t stop innovating because you did just enough – This has been a reoccurring theme for many of the finalists from the previous five rounds of HHSinnovates. After being selected as an HHSinnovates finalist, many of the teams don’t stop innovating, they continue to work on their project to make it better, be it increasing functionality or making it scalable. For example, of the most recent finalists, NIAID’s Free Stuff project team already has plans to scale their project to other parts of NIH, which may lead to savings of thousands of taxpayer dollars. Ultimately, the HHSinnovates program celebrates HHS employees who solve critical problems, think in creative ways and implement innovative practices; just because the awards ceremony is over doesn’t mean teams stop progressing and innovating.

The next round of HHSinnovates starts October 22nd, with public voting occurring later this winter. To watch the awards ceremony in its entirety and for more information on all past winners of the contest go to the HHSinnovates page.

Congratulations to all the participants!

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Using Videos on Facebook to Encourage Dialogue

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 15:42:45 +0000

Kathryn Harben and Lauren Elsberry, both of the Million Hearts™

Million Hearts™ recently launched a new educational program—Team Up. Pressure Down —to help pharmacists engage consumers in a conversation about blood pressure control. Animated videos and custom Facebook tabs provide a targeted method for reaching audiences with useful educational tools.

According to a recent Vital Signs report from the CDC, more than half of Americans with hypertension (also known as high blood pressure) don’t have their blood pressure under control. Millions more Americans aren’t even aware that they have the condition. Controlling high blood pressure is a key component of the Million Hearts™ initiative. Team Up. Pressure Down. offers support for pharmacists and other health care professionals to help patients more effectively manage their blood pressure.

Blood Pressure Basics Animated Video

A key component of the program’s outreach strategy is the use of animated videos embedded on the website and the tabs of the Million Hearts Facebook page to explain what blood pressure is, how treatments work in the body, and why viewers should care. In the past few years, online video consumption has risen dramatically and videos are a popular content type for sharing with friends.

The three short animated films created for Team Up. Pressure Down. invite viewers into a quirky neighborhood (featuring a pill-bottle shaped pharmacy) and introduce them to engaging characters (including Franny, the family dog). This one-of-a-kind video series--created using 2D and 3D animation--adds a fresh perspective to a very serious topic, and explains the role that pharmacists can play in helping people manage their high blood pressure.

Customizing Facebook Tabs to Promote Health Resources

Team Up. Pressure Down. resources are available in custom tabs on the Million Hearts™ Facebook page (and at millionhearts.hhs.gov). Million Hearts™ made the decision to post the videos and other resources on Facebook because of the great success to date with reaching and interacting with people interested in heart health. Targeted Facebook advertising has helped the initiative acquire 52,000 fans who match the ages and ethnicities of people at greatest risk for heart attack and stroke.

With higher-than-average engagement rates and a large existing fan-base, the strategic decision to house Team Up. Pressure Down. materials on Facebook was almost a no-brainer. The custom tabs are designed to provide easy-to-understand information to the people who need it, where they already are. The tabs prompt users to “Share” and “Like” resources, extending the reach of the program by capitalizing on users’ social connections.

With the added benefit of attracting more pharmacists to the Facebook page through the Team Up. Pressure Down. campaign, pharmacists and patients can participate in the conversation online. The Million Hearts^TM Facebook page now brings patients and pharmacists to the same space to comment on postings and begin a dialogue to help patients understand the value of teaming up with their pharmacist offline too.

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Trending Illnesses in Social Media

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 14:18:27 +0000

Nicole Lurie, M.D., M.S.P.H., Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, Department of Health and Human Services

Studies of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and the Haiti cholera outbreak demonstrated that social media trends can indicate disease outbreak more quickly than traditional surveillance methods. Early identification of an outbreak allows health officials to respond quickly to protect communities.

Challenge Winner www.MappyHealth.com

Local health departments asked my office, HHS’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (www.phe.gov) for help in using social media to better understand health trends in their communities. So we decided to harness the innovation of the public and put out a challenge to developers to create a user-friendly web-based tool that uses open source Twitter data to automatically deliver a list of the top five trending illnesses from a specified region in a 24-hour time period. The goal is for health agencies to be able to better determine emerging public health threats by cross-referencing this data with conventional surveillance systems and identifying baseline trends.

The entries were impressive and showed a lot of imagination and diverse approaches. The winning entry, www.mappyhealth.com , tracks 25 health conditions using over 200 associated health terms. Taking real-time data from the Twitter API, MappyHealth analyzes tweets to determine which condition they may fall under and then applies qualifiers to further verify the data. Visitors to the site can visualize data in a number of ways including by condition, location and through time-frame trend graphs spanning two, four, 24 and 48 hours. MappyHealth also links to MedlinePlus (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/) where people can get further information about conditions they see on the site.

The MappyHealth team actually formed through Twitter when Brian Norris reached out looking for teammates via the challenge hashtag, #nowtrending2012, and found Mark Silverberg and Charles Boicey. The team wins a $21,000 prize for the application, which team members will present during an HHS-sponsored public forum discussing citizen-generated data.

We are just at the beginning of learning about what this kind of data means for situational awareness, research, and individual and community empowerment. Reliable and publicly available real-time information has the potential to modernize our public health system and better protect communities. We’re excited to see such creativity and hope this stimulates even more innovation.

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Public Engagement, Social Media

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Building Public Engagement Using “Twitter Townhalls”

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:22:48 +0000

Deborah A. Temkin, Ph.D., Bullying Prevention Coordinator, U.S. Department of Education

StopBullying.gov Twitter Townhall

One of the challenges with social media in the federal government is how to interact directly with followers. Often, we have limited capacity to reply to direct questions. Holding events such as a twitter townhall, however, allows a set timeframe for followers to directly interact with government representatives.

On March 20, 2012 @StopBullyingGov participated in its first Twitter Townhall hosted by the CDC and was joined in addition by the Anti-Defamation League. The “#VetoViolence” townhall on bullying was one of a series held by CDC on topic relating to youth violence. Widely promoted during the weeks prior, the chat attracted many users asking questions about bullying and attracted 207 visits to StopBullying.gov using dedicated campaign links.

During the chat, the dedicated hashtag was seen trending worldwide. Engagement was high, with users asking questions using the hashtag, as well as users joining in on answering questions asked. In the preparations and throughout the chat itself, several best practices emerged in holding a Twitter Townhall:

Having both Federal and Non-Federal official participants is useful to be responsive to questions that may be beyond the government’s purview to respond.
Pre-preparing tweets is essential to responding quickly and accurately to inquiries. Using campaign tagged links to information on federal websites is especially helpful to understand the impact of the tweets.
When having multiple handles respond, it is critical to delineate topic responsibility and have as many of the tweeters gathered together in a central location or on a conference call to determine who will respond to what questions.
Allowing room for users to retweet is an important consideration in quickly crafting tweets
Not every question will be answered. Having multiple people viewing the twitter chat to help identify questions is especially useful with high levels of engagement.

We hope to repeat such engagement on our next Twitter Townhall, hosted by the Washington DC Office of Human Rights on October 5 at 3pm EST. That event, using hastag #BullyFreeDC , will have @StopBullyingGov , @GLSEN, @PACERCenter, @TrevorProject, and @SafeSchoolsNow as official participants in the chat.

For more information on how HHS is coordinating social media projects and public engagement, visit the Working Better and People First sections of this site.

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‘Reducing Cancer among Women of Color’ App Challenge

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 20:48:03 +0000

J. Nadine Gracia, MD, MSCE, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Minority Health (Acting), Office of Minority Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Calling all software developers, entrepreneurs, and innovators—the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seeks your help in empowering women in minority and underserved communities to fight and prevent cancer.

Each year, more than 300,000 new cases of breast, cervical, uterine, and ovarian cancer are diagnosed in the United States. While these diseases touch every community, disparities in education, prevention, early treatment, quality of care, and access to support mean that minority and underserved women bear a disproportionate burden.

In the face of these disparities, HHS has launched a new challenge to help turn the tide: the “Reducing Cancer among Women of Color” App Challenge. The challenge invites developers to create an application (app) for mobile devices that can help improve the prevention and treatment of breast, cervical, uterine, and ovarian cancer. Up to $100,000 will be awarded for apps that provide high-quality health information to women and community health workers, interface securely with patient health records, and strengthen communication across provider care teams.

This month, as we reaffirm our commitment to promoting prevention and fighting cancer in recognition of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we are turning to new platforms and new approaches in our effort to address cancer disparities. We are reaching consumers where they are—recognizing that minorities rely heavily on mobile devices for accessing information. We are turning to new technology, and sourcing solutions directly from those who understand it best. And we are raising awareness about health equity among new audiences—including those who are already dedicated to thinking innovatively about solutions for tough challenges.

The ‘Reducing Cancer among Women of Color’ App Challenge is a partnership between the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and HHS’s Office of Minority Health. To learn more, visit Challenge.gov.

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Minority Health, Mobile Apps, Public Engagement, Womens Health

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Glad You Asked: Open Data Questions

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 16:57:08 +0000

Richard Stapleton, Deputy Director, Web Communications and New Media Division

So we are liberating our data. So what? Tell me why this is good, one person writes. Tell me this is not bad, writes another.

Comment:

This is good news for techies but would love for you to expand on how this benefits the average Joe (because no doubt it does!). 'Liberating data' is good pr but explaining how it can and will change lives by getting more people (public and NOW private sector) individuals using accurate data/ content sets to produce products to make our lives better, safer, and more healthy seems like a more important message. Maybe less catchy but more clear, I think anyway

Response:

We just happen to have a perfect example. U.S. News & World Report today (10/3) unveiled a web-based tool to help consumers find the best health insurance plans for their specific needs. Their Best Health Insurance Plans rates plans based on coverage and costs (both monthly and out-of-pocket), and makes it easy for users to find top-rated plans available to them based on where they live. The U.S. News tool pulls its information using the HHS HealthCare Finder API. It’s a textbook example of what the private sector can do with “liberated” government data. Read more about Open Data at HHS.

Comment:

What other information do these 'warehouses' hold? Does HHS have my personal data? Creepy.

Response:

The ‘warehouses’ hold lots of data about people but none of it is personal, in the sense that someone could plug your name in and find information about you. The law closely protects what’s called “personally identifiable information.” So while people can look up the number of heart attacks in a year and can break that number down by age and gender and even locality, they cannot look up whether or not you personally have suffered an illness. Your privacy is protected.

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Glad You Asked

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Glad You Asked: Audience-based Websites

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 16:59:29 +0000

Richard Stapleton, Deputy Director, Web Communications and New Media Division

Our commitment to consolidating web content into topic-based websites has generated much interest. One commenter asks about alternate models:

Comment:

I like the direction - just curious, why content by topic vs. by audience type a la girlshealth.gov, etc.? I know some of these exist but am wondering what HHS folks think about content by issue vs. content by audience? Or, does your strategy have room for multiple content types? What have users wanted/preferred in testing?

Response:

Actually, we organize content both by topic and by audience, depending on its nature. If content is unique to an audience, of interest only to women, for instance, we organize it that way. Our website WomensHealth.gov is an example. Sometimes, we’ll organize a subset of content by audience within a topic-based site. For example, our flu website includes a section dealing with audiences at special risk.

But most content is of interest to many, if not all, audiences. When we started developing audience sites, we realized that we were duplicating content on page after page, site after site. Quitting smoking, for instance, is equally a concern for men and women from youth to senior citizen. Even not so obvious topics such as breast cancer turn out to affect as well as impact both women and men. Thus topic-based has become our default for content organization.

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Glad You Asked, Public Focus

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Responsive Design and the New Medicare.gov

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 13:32:17 +0000

Jon Booth Director, Website & New Media Group, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) launched a major redesign of the Medicare.gov website making content more accessible and easier for beneficiaries, their families, and caregivers to understand.

This redesign represents three major milestones:

Mobile: The redesign of Medicare.gov is our first full dive into mobile-friendly web design. We are using "responsive design" which is a new approach to web design that allows us to provide an optimal viewing experience on any device. This allows us to support traditional desktop PCs, tablets, and smartphones all from one URL and code base. That is, there is not a separate mobile or M-Dot website, but Medicare.gov itself is fully optimized when viewed on a mobile device.
Working Better: The migration of Medicare.gov to the Percussion content management system means that for the first time, all of CMS' public websites are managed using the same system. This greatly increases efficiencies and allows us to reuse the same management processes across all of our websites.
People First: This redesign fully embraced the principles of good web management and governance. It is the result of more than two years of research, design, and development work by CMS. Using call center questions, website analytics, and online survey results, CMS identified top user tasks including finding out what Medicare covers, cost and coordination of benefits information, and finding Medicare drug and health plans.

These changes take us strongly in the direction laid out in the Federal CIO's Digital Government Strategy. And the Digital Strategy will be a key driver of all of our web initiatives over the next 12-18 months.

Help us field test our site. Visit Medicare.gov on a smartphone or tablet and let us know what you think! What do you like and what can we work to improve?

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Medicare, Responsive Design

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Glad You Asked: Calls To Action

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 18:20:50 +0000

Richard Stapleton, Deputy Director, Web Communications and New Media Division

We’re getting lots of comments, as you can see; some critical; some complimentary, some questioning. One question jumped out as a great way to explain just what “interaction” means here, and how we hope to benefit from the conversation:

Visitor: 15 comments over the past week, but I don't see any engagement with the host. It isn't engagement if people post and never hear back. Do you take the comments back to a secret committee? Does an underling approve stuff that does not have curse words? Is there a report to leadership? How does this "engagement" impact the decisions of HHS? Or NIH? Or the government? Some good and interesting ideas on this post. But then they are just sitting here. Kinda lonely.

Comment submitted on the blog post Putting People First

No, no secret committees. Though we do screen for appropriateness (and so far have been able to post every comment we’ve gotten). Ironically, as you were sending this comment, we were posting our first response to comments (see “Continuing the Conversation”). We aggregate comments weekly and those reports go to senior managers. And they are right there for everyone to see.

The ideas submitted to our “Calls to Action” are likewise aggregated and will help to inform web decisions moving forward. “Call to Action” ideas have not been posted yet (a site-design issue) but will be shortly and we will be looking for “crowd wisdom” in determining which suggestions most warrant action. We don’t want them to feel lonely!

Visitor: I don't like supermarkets. I prefer to order things online and have them delivered to me.

Comment submitted on the People First page.

Touché. But how about an online supermarket (think large South American river)? And no waiting for delivery! That’s our goal for topical websites.

Thanks for your comments. Keep them coming. And watch here for response and reaction.

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Glad You Asked, Public Engagement

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Social Media Used To Create Lifelines

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 17:42:39 +0000

Kathryn Hambleton, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

When a hurricane, earthquake, flood, or fire happens, we often see a tremendous number of people use Facebook and other social media to share information with friends and family to let each other know they are ok or seek help when they do not fare as well.

The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) sought to leverage these social connections on Facebook to enhance community and individual resilience in an emergency by connecting people with “Lifelines” before disaster strikes. Lifelines are friends you can count on and who agree to check on you in an emergency, supply you with shelter, food, or other necessities, or provide your social network with an update about your wellbeing if you can’t do it yourself.

After a thorough search of Facebook revealed a lack of personal preparedness apps, ASPR issued the Facebook Lifeline Application Challenge to bridge the gap. The goal of this challenge was to create emergency apps that would refine and better support this phenomenon, by providing emotional support to people’s networks and helping to keep traditional channels of communication open that are frequently overwhelmed during disasters and emergencies.

The contest produced two winning apps, called bReddi and Project: Lifeline which do more than allow users to identify lifelines. They also let users create and share personal preparedness plans, track the status of their Facebook friends in disaster-affected areas, and print cards with a snapshots of their preparedness plans to carry in their wallets.

Read more about these emergency kit mobile apps on PHE.gov.

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Mobile Apps, Social Media

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First-Time Public Voting for Top Health Innovations at HHS.

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 04:00:00 +0000

Bryan Sivak, Chief Technology Officer, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

UPDATE: Voting is now closed

Typically when you think of government, the word “innovation” isn’t the first word that comes to mind. Well it’s time to change that! The U.S Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is proud to announce that for the first time ever, the public will have the opportunity to vote on the finalists of the HHSinnovates Program. That means, your vote will help determine which project will be selected as the winner of the “People’s Choice”.

Now in its fifth round, the HHSinnovates Program seeks not only to recognize and reward good ideas but also to facilitate the exchange of innovative ideas throughout the Department and beyond. These new approaches are created to help carry out the Department’s mission: to enhance the health and well-being of Americans by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering strong, sustained advances in the sciences, underlying medicine, public health, and social services. Employees use the innovation-conducive environment to create new solutions to solve critical problems in these areas.

With over 450 great projects submitted over five rounds since the HHSinnovates Program launched in 2010, the establishment of the “People’s Choice” will give the public a view of the innovative projects being adopted in government and health care, and also a say in what project best embodies innovative spirit, is scalable and replicable.

From an initial 60 projects submitted this round, we have chosen the top six. But now we need your help in deciding which project you feel has the ability to be the most innovative and impactful – in other words, to be the “People’s Choice”.

Click here to view the submissions and cast your vote.

Public voting is open until September 14, 2012. See two projects that are worthy of your vote? Feel like you just can’t decide which project is the best? Let us know by voting.

The awards ceremony will be held on September 24th from 11 – 11:30 AM and will be telecast on http://www.hhs.gov/live

For more information on the HHSinnovates Program, visit: HHSinnovates.

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Glad You Asked, Public Engagement

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Glad You Asked: Continuing the Conversation

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 20:20:46 +0000

Prudence Goforth, Director, Web Communications and New Media Division

Thanks to everyone who has commented and do keep your comments coming. We have received thoughtful, good ideas on what you want to see. Many encourage the use of mobile so that access is immediate when and where health information or services are needed. I want to answer some of the comments here and will continue do so from time to time.

Comment: A desire to incorporate visuals on mobile sites.

Agreed! A good visual can be worth more than a thousand words if it provides context and directly supports the information needed. Learning and understanding becomes much easier when visuals support the words. When designing content for mobile use, these visual benefits have to be tempered by the fact that graphics often make the loading of the mobile information much slower. Sometimes the visual is too much for some phones to support. That will change one day, but for now, we must balance using more visuals with insuring that critical information can be easily accessed on mobile and tablet devices. We are learning more each day about building better mobile sites (and soon, this site will use responsive design so it can be viewed on any device). We value your input in reminding and urging us to use more visuals. We welcome advice on how best to do mobile sites so they are inviting and so information sought can be quickly accessed.

Comment: What kind of research do you conduct to determine when it would be good to build a one-stop, topic site?

HHS believes strongly in the consolidation of content on a specific topic. Gathering information from the many parts of HHS in one place makes it easier for you to find the information you need. But this is a very large job. Any one office may only have one piece of the total picture. Here are some of the steps we go through before undertaking a topic site: (1) we conduct a complete inventory of all the web pages that exist on the topic; (2) we use metrics for existing sites to tell us about traffic and where people are going; (3) we look for duplication of information and whether it is current; and (4) we consider the timeliness and need for the information (examples—bullying prevention, food safety). Our greatest challenge is that there is so much valuable content that needs to be organized and consolidated into topic sites!

Most of our consolidated sites are managed by a cross-department or government Editorial Board with subject matter experts and web and communications staff that approve content and maintain the site to add new or update information as needed. Cross-department/government sites need a strong leadership and governance that establishes how people will work together and fund and maintain the site.

What do you think? How can we make information more available? We’ve suggested some ways we are exploring. We are sure there are other—perhaps better—ways we have not thought of. So please share your ideas and suggestions. Thanks.

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Participation, Collaboration, and Transparency

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 18:57:45 +0000

Andrew Wilson, SAMHSA Office of Communications

Public participation and collaboration are central to making the Digital Strategy work. At the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), they are central to our work to improve the organization and presentation of SAMHSA’s website.

As part of our initial efforts, SAMHSA has been using an online exercise (cardsorting) that allows anyone interested to provide input on how to better organize and categorize the information on the website. In just one week, more than a thousand people provided direct, concrete feedback about what works and what doesn’t on our site. The effort to improve the website has become a true collaboration between those managing the website and those who use it.

We believe that transparency has benefits for everyone. Stakeholders can see how information is collected and used and, with respect to the Federal Digital Strategy, transparency helps agencies learn from each other. The result is a win-win situation where the public gets a better product and agencies get faster and smarter.

With this in mind, we not only produced a short video to help explain the cardsorting exercise , we have also posted the raw data for each of the key audiences that participated in the exercise. You can learn more about card sorting at Usability.gov.

To learn more about SAMHSA’s efforts to improve our website, visit the SAMHSA blog. Are there other tools and techniques we should consider? Are there other ways we could use card sorting? Drop a comment below and let us know!

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Creating a Virtual Summit to Promote Bullying Prevention

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 16:58:36 +0000

Katie Gorscak, Digital Communications Division, ASPA/HHS

Earlier this month, the Federal Partners in Bullying Prevention held its third annual summit on August 6-7th. The event drew a variety of participants, including government and non-profit leaders, as well as parents, researchers and students engaged in anti-bullying work. Since the Summit in Washington, DC, wasn’t open to everyone, we felt it was important to bring the event to homes, offices, and community centers across the country via our website and social media channels. So for the first time, we did a livestream of the two-day summit, and promoted it extensively through Twitter and Facebook.

During the summit, we introduced several new initiatives that were launched on the StopBullying.gov website over the past months, including a rev-vamped kids section, a blog, and community training materials. We extensively used our Twitter handle and Facebook page to promote what was happening at the Summit and to drive people to our website.

In order to highlight the summit and the new materials, we created a hashtag for the event (#BullyingSummit) and created campaign URLs for some of these specific initiatives. We saw great results in our efforts on Twitter, including 1,143 new followers and 724 retweets between August 5th and 9th. Our campaign tagged URLs drew 819 visits to the site, a large portion of which went straight to our livestream. We actively engaged our Twitter and Facebook audiences by taking their questions for the panel through #BullyingSummit and tweeting throughout the summit.

Despite this increase in traffic to the site, one lesson learned is that while regular tweeting was embraced by the virtual audience, careful consideration should be taken into being more selective in the frequency and content of Facebook posts. Even though the increase in the number of Facebook “unlikes” was small, it is something to consider when developing a social media plan for any type of event.

Overall, our social media efforts have kept traffic high on our site. The increase we saw in visitors to StopBullying.gov during the Summit week has maintained into the following week with only a slight drop in site traffic. It is our hope that this momentum will continue as we continue to use social media as a driving force in our outreach efforts.

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