As you may (probably) have noticed, AcademyHealth launched an improved and redesigned website last week. We’re excited to share this new resource with you, one that elevates evidence and provides a space to share high quality information showcasing the value and relevance of health services research.
For months, we’ve been working behind the scenes to upgrade our website. As the professional society for health services researchers, we wanted our site to accurately reflect the vibrancy and diversity of our members and the field. As with our recent office move, the transition to a new site provided an opportunity to rethink how we work and engage with our community. We started with a deep look at our core principles and we quickly saw how we could design this new site to reflect each of them.
We believe that a diversity of opinion and perspective produces high quality evidence. Yet, our old site was organized primarily by AcademyHealth-led programs. This approach displayed separation rather than the cross-team, multidisciplinary efforts we’ve been moving toward.
We serve as a voice for the field in Washington, and an advocate for the use of evidence in decision-making in general. But vast sections of our old site provided only a limited view of the field, and in terms only a researcher would understand.
To realize our mission, we knew we had to be able to translate the work of the field in terms that our different audiences would understand. So the new site focuses its navigation on the core aspects of AcademyHealth’s support for the field – sharing and supporting evidence, serving the membership, providing professional resources to build a robust field of researchers and health policy professionals, advocating for the funding and resources of the field, hosting first class events, meetings and webinars, and, recognizing the contributions of the staff, member volunteers and board that make AcademyHealth work.
Finally, the new site brings our blogs, conference sites, publications, advocacy and member services into one cohesive site, with items cross tagged to broad categories of evidence. We even built in RSS feeds that will point you toward new research in Health Affairs, HSR and eGEMS, AcademyHealth’s official journals. That should make it easier for everyone to find bodies of work they are interested in, and may even point you toward a new program or project!
Of course, no major web redesign is without its challenges. We’ve transitioned the vast majority of our core content, but we still have work to do. Some of the old links to the separate sites were broken in the transition, and we’re working hard to clean up the broken connections as quickly as possible. We’ve also archived some very old content that our tracking indicated was poorly utilized.
As we continue to fine tune the site, we invite you to stop by and poke around, and we look forward to your feedback. We’re proud of our new site and excited about what it will allow us to accomplish. But, more importantly, we’re proud of the field and the work it represents. We hope this redesigned website will only enhance our ability to better serve our members, our field, our communities, and our health system.
For questions about the new website, please contact communications@academyhealth.org