The Case for Change: The SAMHSA Store, a Groundbreaking New Home for Behavioral Health

Background: How do you take a leap forward in health information dissemination to bring an old-style, print-oriented operation with hundreds of publications into the present-day digital environment?  Federal agencies are grappling with massive amounts of data, trying to codify it in ways that not only make sense to their constituents, but also are manageable online.

Program background: Launching in September 2010, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) new customer-centric publications and resources store is one of the largest efforts within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to bring heath information to the Web.  New knowledge about co-occurring disorders has made it necessary to unify both substance abuse and mental health information into a single home.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Three years in development, store.samhsa.gov has leapfrogged over 15 years of technology.  It combines the best practices of user interface design, taxonomy classification, and persona development techniques to launch a site that already counts 25 million customer touchpoints.

Conclusions:  Store.samhsa.gov takes a page out of the Amazon playbook and provides serendipitous discovery by grouping related resources alongside searched products.  The shopping cart tool is as simple to use as any online store, and the account registration approach gathers valuable information about user types to help fuel future marketing campaigns.  Taxonomy not only unifies mental health and substance abuse issues into a single view of behavioral health, it also codifies hundreds of products into categories that appeal to different audiences—from caregivers, consumers, and counselors to public health and law enforcement officials.  There is even a classification for products intended for Congress.  SAMHSA staff members have their own private views into the store Web site and can upload new products, check on inventory, and obtain up-to-the-minute reports—just as if they were managing their own storefront, with all of the back-end work being done for them.

Implications for research and/or practice:  Store.samhsa.gov will be launched in September with an online promotional toolkit that allows visitors to share SAMHSA product pages with their favorite social media sites.  They can use Facebook’s “Like This” feature to add the store to their Facebook profile and send e-cards, and they can use the store’s widgets and Web badges to promote store content on their own Web sites.  CDC conference participants are invited to a sneak preview of this groundbreaking HHS Web site.