By Ellen Langhans, MA, healthfinder.gov Program Manager, Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Would you like to let visitors to your website know what recommended preventive services are right for them? The Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion has made it easy to add customizable information about recommended preventive services to websites, patient portals, and apps with myhealthfinder 2.0, the latest offering in our suite of content syndication tools. The new, shareable tool makes it possible for visitors to your website to enter their age, sex, and pregnancy status and receive trusted, credible information about recommended preventive services. The recommendations are displayed on your site, without sending visitors to healthfinder.gov for the information.
The tool builds on a recent collaboration with CVS Health. Earlier this summer, we announced that CVS Health incorporated myhealthfinder into its Minute Clinic website to offer their customers personalized recommendations for the clinical preventive services they need. CVS Health used healthfinder’s Application Programming Interface (API), which allows seamless presentation of myhealthfinder into their website and automatic updates as the recommendations change. Today, millions of CVS Health customers have ready access to reliable guidance regarding the preventive care that’s right for them.
In addition to expanding the reach of myhealthfinder’s lifesaving information about recommended preventive services to millions of visitors to CVS Health’s Minute Clinic website, this collaboration made it possible to use what was learned during their implementation of the API to develop a new tool that doesn’t require a web developer to implement. With the goal of improving the functionality and reach of myhealthfinder through our collaboration with CVS Health, we simplified our technology for sharing myhealthfinder’s interactive content.
Our goal has always been for everyone, regardless of web developer resources or know-how, to be able to easily add myhealthfinder to their website. And, we wanted to offer something more sophisticated than our current myhealthfinder widget, which lets you embed a simple myhealthfinder tool on your website but sends visitors directly to healthfinder.gov to view recommended preventive services. The new myhealthfinder 2.0 tool can be added using a simple HTML embed code that can be copied and pasted into any website.
Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, millions of Americans with private insurance coverage are eligible to receive preventive services without having to pay a co-pay, co-insurance or deductible. As a result, many more organizations may want to know how to share information about preventive services with their audiences. This new myhealthfinder tool will allow us to partner with a broader range of organizations that are looking for free or low cost options for incorporating easy-to-understand information about preventive services into their websites, patient portals, or apps. Using this tool makes it easy to add myhealthfinder’s trusted, credible information about recommended preventive services from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the Bright Futures Guidelines, and the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) Committee on Preventive Services for Women.
We encourage those looking to increase access to information about preventive services to explore the myhealthfinder 2.0 tool and other content syndication options at our developer site and to contact us with ideas for future collaborations. And we ask that you help us spread the word to organizations or individuals that want to include prevention and wellness information on their websites, but who don’t have a large development budget. With this, we keep our MyHealthfinder motto moving forward: Live well. Learn how.