The Digital Government Strategy in Action: How Healthfinder.Gov Is Achieving a Customer-Centric Approach

Background: The Digital Government Strategy challenges the Federal government to enable the American people and an increasingly mobile workforce to access high-quality digital government information and services anywhere, anytime, on any device. With this in mind, and keeping up with the rapidly changing technology landscape, healthfinder.gov has continued to adapt and implement key objectives of the Strategy.

Program background: healthfinder.gov is a user-tested, two-time ClearMark award-winning, federal Web site whose mission is to help the public make informed health decisions by providing accurate, timely, and actionable information. Over the past few years, the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP) has implemented the use of content syndication and an Application Programming Interface (API) on healthfinder.gov for others to access and reuse the prevention and wellness content that is featured on the site. In March 2013, ODPHP implemented responsive design, allowing for the best possible user experience on all devices and at all resolutions. By implementing a responsive site design healthfinder maintains the content and site structure in one place and manipulates it as needed depending on the user’s screen size. In April 2013, ODPHP announced the winner of its healthfinder.gov Mobile App Challenge, which challenged developers to work together with health professionals and potential end users to co-design a mobile app that makes healthfinder.gov content customizable and easy to use. Going forward, ODPHP plans to implement a content repository so that content can be accessed anywhere, at any time, and in any format that the user wants.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  ODPHP evaluates the success of its customer-centric approach by how well it achieves the three objectives of the Digital Government Strategy:

1. Enable the American people and an increasingly mobile workforce to access high-quality digital government information and services anywhere, anytime, on any device
2. Ensure that as the government adjusts to this new digital world, we seize the opportunity to procure and manage devices, applications, and data in smart, secure and affordable ways
3. Unlock the power of government data to spur innovation across our Nation and improve the quality of services for the American people.

It achieves the first objective through the healthfinder.gov mobile app as well as through its responsive design. It achieves the second objective through the healthfinder.gov mobile app. It achieves the third objective through the availability of content syndication and API, and in the future through the use of a content repository.

Conclusions: healthfinder.gov serves as an ongoing case study of offering users tailored, evidence-based prevention and wellness content that is easy to use and understand, and is accessible anywhere and at any time.

Implications for research and/or practice: This case study demonstrates how to develop customer-centric content and engage end users through multiple platforms. Participants will gain an understanding of how to put the Digital Government Strategy into action.