Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched HealthCare.gov, a new website aimed at helping the public understand health insurance reform and find out what health insurance options are available and might work best for them.

We’ll be talking more about Healthcare.gov in the coming weeks, but for now – wonderful job to the entire HHS team.

It’s absolutely gorgeous, as you can see. As HHS Chief Technical Officer Todd Park mentioned in today’s live webcast, “It doesn’t look anything like a typical government website.” You can say that again – clearly the focus has been on making the user experience wonderful for the citizen, right down to the buttons allowing visitors to comment on what is most and least helpful on the site.

Besides really simple explanations of how the law is improving access to healthcare for citizens with all different kinds of needs, the website provides a tool that asks users a series of simple questions and suggests healthcare options that fit their needs. Astonishingly, it supports 3 billion potential personal scenarios or “pathways” to ensure that visitors learn about options most relevant to their lives. The entire project – including design, content, integrating health insurance plan data from thousands of sources, application development, and implementing the Percussion web content management system - was built in 90 days.

Already, it has received A Lot. Of. Press. Craigslist founder Craig Newmark on HealthCare.gov: “Overall, the deal is better customer service from government, and better return for taxpayer dollars, pretty good!”

So, from all of us here at Percussion to the team at HHS: Congrats, and thank you for all that you do.

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