New Healthcare.gov is Open, CMS-Free

Recently HHS CTO Bryan Sivak outlined a new vision for healthcare.gov. The site will relaunch this June with a completely rethought design and architecture.

The new healthcare.gov follows a new CMS-free philosophy. It will be a completely static website, generated by Jekyll. This shift will allow HHS to move away from the use of a content management system for managing Heathcare.gov. Website generators like Jekyll work by combining template files with content and rendering them to static html pages. These generator tools provide a balance between content creation and editing flexibility resulting in an incredibly fast and reliable website.

The new website’s code and content will be accessible in two important ways. First, everything HHS does will be published on GitHub. GitHub is an open source code repository developers can use to share and collaborate on projects. This service is the new standard for sharing and collaborating on all sorts of projects, from city geographic data and laws to home renovation projects and even wedding planning, as well as traditional software projects.

With the new Heathcare.gov’s code available on GitHub others will be able to reuse the entire code-base as they see fit. This is incredibly valuable because some states will set up their own state-based health insurance marketplaces. They will be able to easily check out and build upon the work being done at the federal level.

The second key component of the new heathcare.gov’s openness is that all content will be available through an API. This is a tool that allows for the reuse of information and content. Other governmental or private sector websites will be able to use the API to embed content from healthcare.gov. As official content gets updated on healthcare.gov, the new content will update automatically appear on websites using the healthcare.gov API.

As we redesign Heathcare.gov we will be posting blogs related to the project here. If you have questions or comments about the changes let us know.

Originally published on the HHS.gov Digital Strategy Blog by David Cole, a contractor leading the technical strategy and development of heathcare.gov with contributions from Chris Bernstein, Digital Communications Division, Public Affairs, HHS.