The Story Behind The Building of Healthcare. Gov - 90 Day Creation, Help From Twitter and the Silicon Valley Made It Possible

The website designer was found via Twitter, so any of you that don’t take value in what Twitter can do to connect, think again. Most of the people on the project had been on the committee for quite a while. Tech Crunch digs in and gets a little more information on how the creation of the site came together.

Healthcare.Gov Site Opens To Assist Consumers in Finding Health Insurance – Video and Preview

The site looks nice and very user friendly, compared to most of the sites we see from the government. There’s a video below that explains how the site works and there are additional tabs with information across the top. As mentioned in my prior post, there’s no pricing on the page, but rather you can either link to or use a phone number provided to contact the insurance company.

There were a few additions like the designer in New Jersey who the team connected with. He was found again via Twitter and posted a sample on the web for the team to view and that was the start. We like this site because it’s not like a normal government site.

The aggregation of insurance is slated to come later this year, that is as close as they can get it. This is not the designer’s issue, it the issue created by the algorithms of the insurance companies. They are not simple. They found some nice fresh help with IT folks outside of government collaborating. There’s a permanent link on the Medical Quack under the resources on the right hand side to find the site.

Behind Healthcare.gov: How Washington Is Drawing Inspiration From Silicon Valley, Twitter

Below is the Presidential message and in watching the video it was interesting to see what was said when they asked if the President liked it. Like most consumers he’s not going to go crazy but there were no objections and plus he had all the BP issues going on at the same time, so a bit of an unfair question if you will.

The White House group is very active in expanding social networks too and as you can see it paid off. BD

“We were working 24/7, working in very, very rapid cycles, with very, very short deadlines and milestones. We were working in a very, very nimble hyper consumer focused way…all fused in this kind of maelstrom of pizza, Mountain Dew, and all nighters, and you know idealism.”

That may sound like the caffeine-fueled, sleep-deprived rant of a typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Except it’s not— try Todd Park, the buttoned-up CTO of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Aside from the big fat “.Gov” domain name, the aesthetics of Healthcare.gov seem more akin to a young startup versus something borne out of a provision in the Affordable Care Act. Its clean, simple user interface features a row of big buttons on the top directing users to “find insurance options” or “understand the new law.” Considering how convoluted our health care system system is, Healthcare.gov manages to organize the information in logical buckets and push key concepts to the foreground. Here’s a look at the Healthcare.gov homepage and for comparison, the HHS site (which has more of a standard .gov website feel).

Earlier this year, before the passage of the bill, Macon Phillips stumbled upon Edward Mullen on Twitter, who posted a mock web design of what the heavily debated insurance exchange marketplace could look like. Lesson here: the next time you tweet something random on Twitter, the government could be watching with a job offer in hand.

Behind Healthcare.gov: How Washington Is Drawing Inspiration From Silicon Valley, Twitter