Finding information from the National Institutes of Health about human health, disease, and biomedical research is about to look a lot different. On Monday, the NIH will unveil a new version of its website that shifts attention away from individual institutes and centers and towards eight thematic hubs focused on health, research, data, clinical studies, rare diseases, technology, cancer, and grants.
Agency officials say the redesign — which is part of an ambitious project to consolidate the NIH’s digital footprint — is intended to streamline what was a sprawling and fractured information ecosystem, requiring users to understand the NIH’s organizational structure, into an intuitive experience that more closely reflects what type of information people seek out most often.
The goal, said Amanda Fine, NIH deputy director for public affairs, is “to make trusted NIH information across the agency easier and faster to find.”
The beta version, which was soft-launched this week, is still under development and will continue to evolve in the coming months, NIH officials told STAT. Some functions, including search, do not yet appear to be operational. During this transition period, NIH’s existing websites will remain available. They will be sunset on a rolling basis “as critical and mandated content is verified and redirects are put in place,” Fine told STAT.
Researchers who study science communication and science misinformation say the overhaul is a welcome development. “It was badly needed,”said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication and former director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “Trying to find something on the old website required the skills of an Egyptologist.”
Over the past few decades, the NIH’s digital footprint had ballooned to include more than 700 separate websites — often with different, non-connecting backend architectures and hosting platforms — stretching across millions of webpages. Information was duplicated across five or six locations, sometimes appearing in slightly different configurations. Its potential for creating confusion became apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the public turned to the NIH and other federal science agencies for guidance and information about the fast-moving public health crisis.
“It became a dramatic illustration of a dysfunctional website whose dysfunction wasn’t evident pre-Covid,” said Hall Jamieson.
Spurred by the pandemic, the NIH began to develop its first-ever five-year strategic communications plan in 2022 under President Biden. Working groups made up of more than 70 staffers from communications offices spread across NIH’s 27 institutes and centers came up with a plan to streamline the hundreds of NIH-owned websites to just one per institute. This massive undertaking was set to be phased over five years, starting in 2025.
That plan, which was never published but which was obtained by STAT, was scrapped when the Trump administration came in and fired hundreds of communications staffers as part of a government-wide reduction in the federal workforce. As a result of the layoffs and mass cancellation of contracts in early 2025, millions of NIH websites have been effectively frozen for nearly 18 months. That created a sense of urgency for the remaining dozen or so communications employees tasked with pushing forward website consolidation under the new administration.
Fine said her team worked to develop a data-driven process to better understand the path people take to NIH websites and how they navigated them once there. That helped them identify where people were getting stuck and the most highly sought after and frequently accessed information. The content on the new site is taken directly from health information from existing NIH websites, Fine said.
The consolidation, once complete, will reduce the number of NIH-owned websites from more than 700 to a single, fully connected web environment.
Source: www.statnews.com
