The challenge

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) provide healthcare benefits to millions of people every year. But the websites and digital tools that help people find and enroll in these programs were built on a myriad of aging technologies and were confusing to navigate. CMS needed to streamline and update its online platforms to improve the customer experience while establishing more efficient backend workflows for agency staff.

This is an enormous and complex task, involving the modernization of Medicare.gov, CMS.gov, CMS open data portals, and many other public facing apps that serve multiple user groups — including beneficiaries, caregivers, health providers, data professionals, and government stakeholders.

WECMS helps more than 100 million Americans every year apply, find, and enroll in healthcare programs. The information and tools provided are essential components in supporting CMS' goals of creating a truly consumer-focused, streamlined, efficient, and omni-channel experience for beneficiaries and their caregivers. The overall intent for this contract is to ensure continuity of operations for the Americans it serves and the WECMS program, which maintains, designs and implements open source software digital services for CMS’ flagship websites, tools, components and applications on Healthcare.gov, Medicare.gov, CMS.gov, and 7 Open Data catalogs. In addition to engineering and design continuous improvements on these established websites, this contract provides security compliance, devops, system infrastructure, content strategy, information architecture, training, documentation, content editor support, public call center dev support, Section 508 improvements, mobile application development, and tooling and systems expertise.

Client goal

When this multi-year transformation is complete, CMS will be able to deliver on its mission more effectively. CivicActions is providing agile development, DevOps, and human-centered design (HCD) services to help the agency:

• Improve the content editing experience for staff
• Modernize legacy systems and tools
• Replace proprietary technologies with open source
• Support active, informed healthcare consumption

Our approach

Collaboration is the key to success in a project of this scale and complexity. With multiple partner vendors (including our primary partner Fearless) and disparate stakeholders across many organizational layers, we work hard to keep lines of communication open and be up-front about potential problems.

Balancing stakeholder priorities, user needs, technical complexity, and CMS deadlines, we created a roadmap that minimizes risk and maximizes opportunities for success. Then we went to work on “quick wins” — tasks we could complete right away that would make the biggest difference for users.

Address the holistic customer experience

We knew that each CMS application is part of a huge public-facing ecosystem of digital tools, with many touchpoints. To address the entire experience that a person would have in navigating the systems, we drew on the agency’s own knowledge of their beneficiary community, working with them to refine and document how each person interacts with CMS online. The resulting holistic view helped us identify how we could improve that experience iteratively.

Adopt a data-driven strategy

To make sure we built the right solutions, we immersed ourselves in the CMS mission from the operational, technical, and UX perspectives. We dug into existing user research, reviewed analytics reports, conducted stakeholder interviews — then created user personas and journey maps to refine the project scope and goals. All this data is managed in a shared repository of user insights and project knowledge, which we refer to as we prioritize the work to be done.

Replace proprietary software with open source

We are “reverse engineering” multiple custom-built Microsoft.NET applications (such as the Medicare Eligibility and Premium Calculator and the congressionally-funded Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) Lookup Tool with modern, open source solutions. As we recreate all these applications in Drupal, we’re making guides and code documentation that outline the entire system — allowing CMS to maintain control of its own technologies and avoid vendor lock-in. We are also migrating CMS open data platforms from Socrata (proprietary) to an open source solution using DKAN 2.

The challenge

The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) manages the world’s largest public transit system, helping over 11 million passengers get around New York City every day. The data universe is complex and constantly changing, representing a massive network of trains, tracks, and stations — which need to display reliably and in real time to keep riders informed. Acquia and CivicActions worked with MTA to extend the agency’s existing Drupal content management system (CMS) to a network of devices using Amazon’s Internet of Things (IoT). We helped MTA set the modern standard for using digital signage to communicate train arrival times, weather info, and service updates — making it easier for riders to plan their routes and get there on time.

Client goal

Riders rely on station signs and the MTA’s website for travel information to help them know when their train will arrive. To better inform riders in real time, MTA needed a way to display information from their website on digital signs in subway stations and platforms.

• Improve travel experience for subway riders by providing up-to-date info
• Empower MTA administrators to easily manage data on a familiar platform
• Provide real time data to help modernize public transportation
• Implement a flexible system to accommodate future growth

Our approach

To better serve their customers and set their employees up for success, the MTA needed a single administrative site that could manage a lot of data from a variety of external feeds. Drupal 8 was a natural choice for the CMS because it can seamlessly integrate data from all these sources.

Then we connected over 3,000 MTA digital screens as unique devices on a private and secure “Internet of Things” within Amazon Web Services — allowing Drupal to push location-specific data to each individual screen. Read a technical deep-dive on this work from our partner.

Decoupled approach for flexibility

The MTA needed to display data reliably regardless of the device or front-end design. We created a custom decoupled (headless) Drupal theme built in React.js to adapt to different screen sizes and mobile platforms. The decoupled backend continually evaluates and pushes data from a variety of web service APIs, while compensating for incomplete or outdated information, so users only see data that’s relevant to them.

ontent modeling for data management

To help MTA staff manage the flow of data, we created a digital representation — a content model — of the routes, stations, platforms, tracks, and signs throughout the system. This helped us break large data sets into smaller, actionable components so the right information can be served up in the right context.

Open source for cost savings

By using open source technology instead of expensive proprietary software, we helped the MTA lower costs and avoid vendor lock-in. Open source software like Drupal also offers a more flexible web-publishing approach than complex legacy solutions. Additionally, an open source approach can help agencies ensure better web accessibility for the long term.