Reimagining a Federal Health Technology Website

Healthit.gov is one of the most consequential resources in American health technology, the public home of the standards, policy, and certification programs that govern how the nation’s health data moves. But an aging Drupal platform, a tangled information architecture, and a dated interface no longer matched the ambition of the organization behind it.

The mandate was a full modernization across three connected properties: the flagship website, the blog and newsroom, and the data and certification test-method sites. That meant rebuilding the information architecture from the ground up, migrating years of content from Drupal to a WordPress multisite, and establishing a design system rigorous enough to satisfy federal standards – USWDS, Section 508 accessibility, while still feeling modern, editorial, and alive.

The real test arrived mid-project, when ONC was reorganized into ASTP. Overnight the brand, voice, and visual direction had to shift. In the end, we absorbed two rebrands, and shipped a site that proves a federal platform can be both fully compliant and genuinely beautiful.

We built a custom Gutenberg block system on top of USWDS, giving editors federally-compliant, accessible components with the flexibility of a modern page builder, and giving the site a look that pushes well past the conventions of traditional government websites.

Underneath, we integrated a custom AI layer built on Claude to give the team continuous insight into the site’s health – analyzing analytics, content quality, performance, keywords, security posture, and AI visibility. It turned a static publishing platform into one that actively surfaces where content and performance can improve.

The site launched on a unified WordPress multisite with a new information architecture, a custom design system, and a publishing experience purpose-built for a federal content team.