NIH rolling out streamlined website to help public find information more easily — SkimNews
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- NIH will unveil a redesigned website Monday built around 8 thematic hubs (health, research, data, clinical studies, rare diseases, technology, cancer, and grants), with a beta version soft-launched this week though some functions like search are not yet operational.
- The consolidation will fold NIH's 700+ separate websites — spread across millions of pages and different backend architectures — into a single connected web environment, with existing sites sunset on a rolling basis as content is verified and redirects put in place.
- NIH's first-ever 2022 five-year strategic communications plan, developed by 70+ staffers across its 27 institutes and centers to streamline to one website per institute starting in 2025, was scrapped after the Trump administration came in and fired hundreds of communications staffers.
- The Trump administration's early-2025 layoffs and mass contract cancellations left millions of NIH websites effectively frozen for nearly 18 months, creating urgency for the roughly dozen remaining communications employees tasked with pushing the consolidation forward.
- Amanda Fine, NIH deputy director for public affairs, said her team used data-driven analysis of user navigation paths to identify where visitors got stuck and what content they sought most, and that the new site's content is drawn directly from existing NIH health information.
- Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center called the prior site something that "required the skills of an Egyptologist" and said COVID-19 "became a dramatic illustration of a dysfunctional website whose dysfunction wasn't evident pre-Covid."
Why it matters: The redesign replaces a system that forced users to understand NIH's internal structure just to find health information, consolidating 700+ separate websites into a single hub-based portal. The project was effectively rebooted from scratch by roughly a dozen remaining communications employees after the Trump administration's early-2025 layoffs — which had frozen millions of NIH pages for 18 months — scrapped the original Biden-era five-year plan.
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