HHS Web Council

Thursday, April 7th, 2011
9:00m - 12:00pm
Room 505A Humphrey Building

Council Members in attendance:

• Dick Stapleton - Co-Chair
• Alba Sierra (ACF)
• Carol Crawford (CDC)
• Christy Choi (OS)
• Dawn Colbern (SAMHSA)
• Dennis Rodriguez (NIH)
• Ketan Patel (CMS)
• Jon Booth (CMS)
• Joyce Backus (NIH)
• Mary Lazerri (HRSA)
• Miguel Gomez (OS)
• Randie Siegel (AHRQ)
• Scott Dolan (FDA)
• Kathryn Hambleton - Meeting facilitator
• Read Holman - taking notes

Action Items:

• Take the follow-up survey
• Determine who is the official rep from your OpDiv (check hhs.gov/web and send updates to Kathryn)

ASPA Updates

Dick Stapleton

Update on Potential Gov’t Shutdown

Dick Stapleton

Congress has yet to reach consensus on the 2011 budget. Current funds (available through a Continuing Resolution) only run through Friday. What does the prospect of a government shutdown mean for our websites?

Many questions up in the air. We’re awaiting direction from Senior Leadership on specific actions that would need to be taken. Likely each OpDiv will be instructed to take care of its own shop. OpDiv-specific guidance should come from OpDiv Senior Leadership.

Bottom line is that we are not allowed to incur any expense that would normally be paid for out of our standard budget.

If you’re funded by already obligated funds (such as HealthCare.gov through the ACA), you can stay up. Otherwise plan on either shutting down the websites all together or simply not maintaining them.

Four Question Handout included.

Topic for future conversation: The development and management of Cross Agency / Topical websites. Two new ones:

• StopBullying.gov
• Vaccines.gov

Panel Presentations and Discussion on Mobile

Federal-wide Mobile Community of Practice

Loren Frant, NIH/NLM  - Filling in on behalf of Gwynne Kostin

Who: People from across gov’t that are directly involved mobile services.

What: Two goals of this CoP:

1. Get together regularly to discuss mobile efforts in government
2. Write a “white paper” identifying barriers to mobile. ETA = early May.

This paper is trying to narrow in on 10 barriers.

1. General expertise/ understanding
2. Resources (financial, staff)
3. Technological questions (data infrastructre)
4. How to promote?
5. Internal awareness and education
6. Legal
7. Privacy
8. Security
9. Building Partnerships
10. 0) How do we define success?

Panel Discussion

Members:

• Audie Autienza  | audie.atienza@hhs.gov |  text4health
• Jessica Jacobs  |  jjacobs@hrsa.gov  |  mHealth Collaborative
• Loren Frant  | frantl@nlm.nih.gov |  NLM
• Jeremy Vanderland  | jvanderlan@icfi.com |  AIDS.gov

Audie Autienza, Immediate Office of the Secretary

• Lead, text4health Task Force
• The Researcher’s Perspective
• The tales of the street lamp and the ring tone

After we began to move fom oil to electricity to power street lamps, electricity became essential to serving the needs of the street lamps. Contrast that with the ring tone. People thought that ring tones would be a driver of cell phone adoption, but it turns out they were non-essential. It’s important to keep the essential functions of mobile in mind, and not get distracted by the non-essential ones.

About the text4health task force

• About 35 representatives from across HHS
• Just developed official recommendations and submitted to Secretary Sebelius

The Mobile Revolution: Changes in our use of mobile technologies have been consumer centered and driven.

What is mHealth?

Lot of definitions put forth. Some emphasize mobile, others wireless networks, others clinical care.

“But if mHealth is all of these things, than mHealth is nothing.”

In helping define mHealth, we differentiate:

• Mobile vs Stationary
• Mobile vs Wireless Communications
• Mobile vs Cloud Computing

Mobile is about portability and how information is transferred when being portable.

Many Mobile tools and many efforts ongoing within HHS.

Jessica Jacobs, HRSA

Federal mHealth Collaborative

The mHealth Collaborative is a Community of Practice that started out as simply within HHS. Now has about 100 members from HHS, FCC, OSTP and others. Contact Jessica if you’d like to participate.

Meetings via conference call each third Thursday of the month from 2:00 - 3:30pm

An online portal has information on existing HHS efforts. Monthly newsletter covers industry efforts (not limiting to government).

Loren Frant, National Library of Medicine (NIH)

Medline Plus Mobile

A mobile friendly version of the MedlinePlus website released Jan 2010.

Mobile content is driven by XML

[Database + XML from content providers + static html content] fill the MedlinePlus website.

--> Mobile friendly content is then parsed out into an xml feed

--> This xml feed (built on Wurfl) drives the mobile site content

How they got there.

Goal was to optimize the mobile experience for the most users at the lowest cost. Chose to go with the platform-independent mobile-friendly website

Challenges:

site vs app?
device specific display?

• they now publish via WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource File), an xml file with device detection and resolution information.
• took the Wurfl info and created 3 categories of devices: low, med, high quality display
  • these three categories determine exactly what renders following a device being detected.
  • this 3-way categorization was a business decision; WURFL can be spliced however you want it to be spliced

What content to display?

• Device Anywhere - paid service that tests the user experience on various phones
• Vivisimo - mobile search product
• WURFL file used as a base to build device detection (but provided link to full site)

MedlinePlus Mobile later added as a web app in Apple store.

Jeremy Vanderlain

m.AIDS.gov

Context > Content > Container

4 scenarios in which people use mobile devices

• i’m bored
• i’m microtasking
• i’m social
• i’m local / i’m here

Mobile Content is driven by CMS (Percussion)

The website is built snackable and then through content types

Percussion publishes 3 times (web, and 2 mobile versions)

Mobile-friendly website chosen (over an app)

• Reach the most users for the lowest cost
• Mobile is more than smart phone
  • smartphones only 29.7% of mobile device market share (Oct 2010)

Accessibility

Smart phones are relatively accessible, though no standard really set. iPhone known for being out of the box accessible.

40% of google mobile search entries are looking for local info

QR codes - AIDS.gov has 2 (m.AIDS.gov and Locator)

Key points from the QnA discussion

Web apps don’t appear in the iTunes store, only on Apple.com

NLM content: mobile content is a subset of the full site’s content

• particular types of content are pushed to mobile (more text based content)
• those that are not include videos and interactive tutorials

Tablets: Are they more phone or computer? - We don’t know yet.

Mobile publishing: live vs regular/nightly

Live queries are ideal, of course. NLM’s nightly publishing comes from a technological decision made in 1998.

Touch controls (i.e. iPhone) vs scrolling controls (i.e features phones)

iPhone recommends a minimum of 44 x 44 pxl = minimum button size for touch screen button

Advice for newbies: What are the fist steps someone should take?

• Ask why. Who are you trying to reach?
• Look at the analytics. Is your target audience already interacting with you via mobile?
• Talk with someone that’s done it.
• Bring tech/engineers, communications people, and SMEs together early

Round Robins

NIH

• who’s working on eReaders? (CDC and CMS both looking into it)
• website refresh
• SEO effort / web analytics evaluation
• policies in development / Developing Best practices (survey with community included)
• Medline Plus releasing an API

IHS

• 3 yr strategic plan under development
• IHS.gov redesign
• Couple facebook pages (working on a Agency-level page)

OS

• Questions re CMS and 508
• received 300k how HHS is looking at mobile and mobile messaging
• Conference call on the 20th

CDC

• homepage refresh in a couple months
• SEO project
• Developing Social Media Policy (how to represent themselves)
• Evaluation identified as top priority
• Launched the CDC Flu App Challenge
• iPhone App about to launch
• Moving towards CMS (Percussion

SAMHSA

• TOS Issues that need to be addressed (will talk to Read)
• Looking at moving to a CMS soon (in the gathering stage)

AHRQ

• Working on security issues
• 508 issues

FDA

• SEO project
• Evaluating a plan to have an online community
  • looking for the right platform

HRSA

• Percussion instance is moved away from ASPA
• Participated in the StopBullying.gov efforts (which are hopefully moving forward)
• Moving html files to Percussion, redesigning along the way

CMS

• Reorg settled (Division w/i the web group created)
• visual refresh while moving to Percussion
• Security

ACF

• EarlyChildhood.gov about to launch (with ASPA + Ed)

AoA

(not present)

HHS Center for New Media

Read:

TOS

• Continue to follow newmedia.hhs.gov/standards/tos for updates. Notifications aren’t sent regularly since they’re sporadic and not relevant for everyone.
• GSA continues to add new tools and Read tries to get these signed at the Dept level soon thereafter.
  • He’s raised the question to OGC as to whether we can just issue a statement that says “if signed at GSA, consider it signed at HHS”, but there appear to be legal barriers to doing this.

Detailees working with us:

• Moniqua Roberts, NIH Office of Human Resources
• Key Projects: HHS Brownbag Series; Exploring Social Media in Recruitment & Retention
• In-house detail: 40% of total time spent with The Center
• Doug Joubert, The NIH Library
• Key Projects: Mobile Evaluation; Social Media’s Return on Investment/Engagement
• In-house detail: 40% of total time spent with The Center
• Richie Frieman, CMS
• Leading a New Media Round Robin: Monthly conference calls to increase situational awareness on new media activities across the Department

Working with the HHSInnovations Council

• A platform to address the big issues that reach beyond this group. Including: Web access, privacy, security, records management
• Web access issues. Asking for two things:

1. Consistency (across Departments and time)
2. More information as to why certain sites are blocked

Kathryn:

PRA Fast Track

• Fast Track process aims to remove PRA as an obstacle to get feedback from the public related to customer satisfaction and service delivery (usability studies, satisfaction surveys, focus groups, polls, call-center post transaction surveys, etc.)
  • Agencies must submit 30 day notice in Federal Register to notify the public that it intends to use the fast-track process to do collections for service delivery and actionable feedback
  • After FR notice, agencies will be able to submit a 1pg form through Information Collection Officers for actual collection, and OMB will have 5 days to respond (automated notification after 5 days).
  • If OMB has no objections, the agency automatically has approval
  • ASPA submitted FR notice through HHS PRA office last week.  HHS PRA office will post to FR.
  • Any OpDiv will be able to use fast-track process.  Agencies that plan to do a lot of collections may want to submit their own FR notice to manage its own collections.
  • Agencies can contact their Information Collection Officers or Kaya Walton for more information.

New Media as Systems

• We have received a few inquiries asking if third-party systems (like twitter, Facebook, etc.) need to be FISMA certified.  We have begun preliminary discussions with HHS Cybersecurity team to discuss conditions and considerations for the safe use of third-party systems. 

New Media and Privacy

• The HHS Cybersecurity team continues to implement OMB Memo 10-23.  As of last council meeting, they collected inventory of third-party sites and applications from OpDivs, now inputting into reporting system for Privacy Impact Assessments.  If you are starting an account with a third-party site or application, notify Cybersecurity (HHS.Cybersecurity@hhs.gov) team to be included in PIA reporting.

New Media and Records

• The Federal Records Council created a social media subgroup
  • Meets regularly and is drafting templates of possible records schedules
  • The subgroup will submit its recommendations to NARA in May
  • Federal Web Council will be meeting with Federal Records Council to discuss progress

Next Meeting

• Complete survey to provide feedback and suggestions for topics
• At each Web Council Meeting, an OpDiv will be selected at random (pulling names out of a hat) to provide a note taker for the following meeting. Next meeting IHS will provide note taker.
• Kathryn will organize speakers and logistics with input from council members.