Centers for Disease Control Content Syndication

Nov 5, 2012

iPad and Phone showing CDC mobile content
Mobile Gov Experiences are agency stories about creating anytime, anywhere, any device government services and info. This entry is a story shared by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) uses content syndication to share important health information with a variety of federal public health agencies, state and local public health departments, non-profit organizations, academic institutions, and commercial organizations.

Why We Did It

CDC developed content syndication to give our public health partners and other interested parties the tools to deliver credible content directly to their visitors. Keeping information updated and in sync during public emergencies is difficult and time consuming to do manually and often leads to inconsistent and wrong information on partner sites.

What We Did

CDC created an application programming interface (API) that enabling partner organizations to display CDC.gov content on their Web sites by simply adding a JavaScript widget which retrieves the CDC content. CDC assigns a unique campaign ID to each partner that is used for tracking and metrics purposes. This unique ID allows CDC to measure not only the traffic generated on the partner site, but also all traffic from their site back to CDC.gov.

How It Worked

  • Approximately 835 public health partners – including state and local health departments, hospitals, universities and federal agencies – have implemented content syndication on their Web sites.
  • More than 1.6 million page views of CDC content on other web sites and through other channels in 2011-2012 to date.
  • More than 4700 partner URLs containing CDC syndicated content.
  • Content syndication is being used and tested in 46 of the 50 US states by State and Local health departments.

What’s Next

CDC has provided the .NET code for the system to the Federal Drug Administration and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for their reuse, is working with the Department of Health and Human Services to produce a Java version and will be releasing the code as an Open Source project for all to use in the near future.

Nov 5, 2012