NIH rolling out streamlined website to help public find information more easily

On Monday, the NIH will unveil a new version of its website that shifts attention away from individual institutes and centers and toward eight thematic hubs: health, research, data, clinical studies, rare diseases, technology, cancer, and grants. Agency officials say the redesign is part of an ambitious project to consolidate the NIH's digital footprint, replacing a sprawling and fractured information ecosystem that required users to understand the agency's organizational structure with an intuitive experience that more closely reflects what types of information people seek most often. Amanda Fine, NIH deputy director for public affairs, said the goal is "to make trusted NIH information across the agency easier and faster to find."

The beta version was soft-launched this week and is still under development, with NIH officials saying it will continue to evolve over the coming months; some functions, including search, do not yet appear to be operational. During the transition, NIH's existing websites will remain available. Fine said they will be sunset on a rolling basis "as critical and mandated content is verified and redirects are put in place."

Researchers who study science communication and science misinformation say the overhaul is welcome. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication and former director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said, "It was badly needed," adding that finding something on the old website required the skills of an Egyptologist. Over recent decades, the NIH's digital footprint had ballooned to more than 700 separate websites—often with different, non-connecting backend architectures and hosting platforms—stretching across millions of webpages, with information duplicated across five or six locations and sometimes appearing in slightly different configurations. The confusion became apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the public turned to the NIH and other federal science agencies for guidance during a fast-moving public health crisis; Hall Jamieson called it "a dramatic illustration of a dysfunctional website whose dysfunction wasn't evident pre-Covid."

Spurred by the pandemic, the NIH began developing its first-ever five-year strategic communications plan in 2022 under President Biden. Working groups made up of more than 70 staffers from communications offices across NIH's 27 institutes and centers devised a plan to streamline the hundreds of NIH-owned websites to just one per institute. That massive undertaking was set to be phased over five years starting in 2025. The plan, which was never published but was obtained by STAT, was scrapped when the Trump administration came in.