For more than a decade, DSFederal has provided our technical support services to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC). Beginning in 2019, ONC tasked our team with building the Interoperability Standards Advisory (ISA) website. The new ISA web platform serves as a key resource for identifying and assessing interoperability standards within the healthcare industry.
The Challenge:
Up to this point, the ISA model consisted of a static PDF document. Standards and feedback were managed through a manual process relying on email, fax, and mail. Given its role in public health, it was necessary to modernize this process to encourage direct, efficient feedback and public engagement. The new website would need to have the ability to scale to effectively manage, moderate, and organize public feedback from growing number of users. Additionally, it would need to remain in compliance with Federal security guidelines, Section 508 requirements, and SEO best practices for usability.
Our Approach:
DSFederal engaged our application development experts to create an interactive platform, thereby offering public stakeholders the ability to provide feedback and suggestions. Leveraging our highly transparent Agile Process, we created a strict project timeline to complete tasks on or ahead of schedule. As a result of careful project management, the site was deployed on schedule.
A positive end-user experience was a crucial goal for ONC as the ISA model would be reliant on feedback. To achieve this, our team worked closely with stakeholders to establish user-friendly content management workflows. We built a customized search using SOLR to improve the experience for users looking to find Health IT related interoperability standards. This included tailored search solutions to enhance efficiency and advanced browsing functionality to allow for precise content discoverability.
Our team maintained security through continuous monitoring, with the timely implementation of Drupal updates as they arose. Our team employed Total Validator and WAVE Web Accessibility Tools to identify and address Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 compliance issues and ensure the site remained in compliance. We also conducted monthly reviews and SEO reports to resolve issues such as broken links and page errors that could impact Google Search rankings.
The Outcome:
In the end, DSFederal delivered a reliable ISA web platform that facilitates public discussions and feedback on interoperability needs. The new site features an efficient, impactful structure with improved capabilities for an expanding audience, all in compliance with Federal guidelines and SEO best practices.
As we look ahead, our team continues its maintenance of the ISA web platform with security and functionality updates. Our success with this endeavor led to the development of additional standard platforms for ONC, including Standards Version Advancement Process (SVAP) and United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI).
Interested in our case studies? Read more here!