Making Vital Health Information Accessible Online
Education
I’ve lived in Atlanta most of my life. I earned a B.S. at GA Tech in computer science, specializing in software usability and user experience. Then I earned my M.S. degree at GA State University in instructional design, focusing on online training. For my master’s project, I worked with people at CDC to develop an online role-playing game to train public health professionals in the steps of investigating an outbreak. It was called “Pharyngitis in Louisiana.” Players learned to answer classic disease detective questions to identify who was infected, when, where, and with what pathogen. This online game won two national awards.
Jobs Prior to CDC
In 2005, one of the people I worked with to create “Pharyngitis in Louisiana” called to recruit me to work as a private contractor assigned to CDC. I was thrilled and took the job.
First CDC Job
I worked as a contractor at CDC for 19 years and applied for several permanent CDC jobs before I finally got a CDC FTE—assembling a Federal resume is difficult! I was notified that I had the job offer in November 2024 and started work in December 2024. I took a 13% pay cut to leave my contractor position and accept the official CDC government job. I felt that, as a full-time employee, I would be in a better position to implement efficiencies and streamline processes at CDC.
The unit I joined was newly formed to provide support to national, state, and territorial health departments throughout the U.S. and its territories. Part of my job was to streamline the unit’s process for clearing informational materials (meanwhile, ensuring that the materials were accurate, consistent, culturally sensitive, of high quality, and accessible online to people requiring assistive technology). This was a high bar, but I felt that getting sound information out of the agency faster and in a useable, acceptable format was extremely important—that it would actually save lives.
I developed communication materials for CDC’s top training programs (e.g., the E.I.S. fellowship), and worked on health topics including hospital acquired infections, zoonotic diseases, environmental health, and HIV/STD/TB. I was also temporarily assigned to the covid vaccine task force.
Although my primary focus was communicating vital information to professional audiences, I also worked on materials intended for the general public, including individuals at risk for specific diseases. Instead of just “data dumping,” I applied user experience strategies, cognitive psychology, and communication principles to understand and meet user needs and expectations. This kind of approach has been shown to make health information easier to find, read, understand, and use.
Proudest Achievement
I redesigned a CDC website containing important information on keeping hospital inpatients safe. It consisted of information from a 7-book series called Hospital Acquired Infection Control Guidelines and Recommendations. The original print series contained almost 900 pages of scientific information and the existing website was simply an online copy; this format failed to take into account the difference between the way people find information online vs. the way they find it on paper.
The primary audience for the information is infection control personnel and clinicians in healthcare facilities. I identified CDC staff who had held such roles prior to coming to the agency and interviewed them to determine how they found infection control information and how they used it. I applied the resulting insights (and other principles and techniques) to the reorganization of the website. I made the most crucial information easier to find, at the same time retaining everything else in deeper site layers that scientists and other specialized audiences could reach through intuitive navigation pathways. I then tested the redesign by asking people at CDC to find a specific piece of information, instructing one group to find it on the original website and one group to find it on the redesigned website. It took people several minutes to find crucial information on the original website but only seconds to find it on the redesigned site. Such a time savings can be clinically significant in, for example, a busy intensive care unit. According to a web traffic counter that tracks visits to all .gov websites, the redesigned website was the most visited .gov website for a few days after it was launched, which was just before tax season.
A serendipitous anecdote tells the story well. I was visiting my mother in the hospital and started talking to her nurse. The conversation turned to hospital acquired infection control procedures. At that point, the nurse said that she teaches infection control to her nursing group. She pulled out her smartphone and said “CDC recently redesigned their infection control website. I love it. Here, let me show it to you.” She had no idea that I worked at CDC and certainly didn’t know that I redesigned that site.
To make potential users aware of the re-designed website, I proposed a presentation on it to the American Medical Association. The proposal was accepted, but the presentation was cancelled in line with recent policy directives. Eventually, the website was redesigned to fit the latest CDC-wide website format, and several of the efficiency features I developed and tested were eliminated.
Impact of My Work
Two of the products I helped develop while I was still a CDC contractor were officially recognized for excellence. I received approval from leadership to submit the Best Practices for Environmental Cleaning in Healthcare Facilities in Resource-Limited Settings to CDC’s Informatics Innovation Unit 2018 Technology Challenge competition. In 2019, it received the Excellence in Partnering (International) CDC Annual Honor Award. Then, in 2023, I contributed to the Laboratory Assessment of Antibiotic Resistance Testing Capacity (LAARC); this was the first system to identify laboratories in low-resource settings that are capable of producing accurate and reliable antibiotic resistance (AR) data; it was award-winning as well.
Leaving CDC
There were rumors about terminations for a few weeks, but no concrete information. At 4:00 on Valentine’s Day, my center’s leadership called an impromptu meeting to warn us that termination emails were being sent out. They had no answers to who would get them or when. On Sunday morning, I got a call from my manager telling me that another health communicator on my team had gotten the termination letter. I checked my email and discovered that I had also received the letter at around 7pm the day before. It was from an acting HHS HR official, and it announced my termination during the Federal probationary period. It did not specify my termination date. On Tuesday (Monday was President’s Day), I discovered I was locked out of the CDC network.
Although my manager was impressed with my work, the termination letter stated “…you are not fit for the continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs, and your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment.” Having been a full-time CDC employee for less than three months, I had not yet had a performance review.
Other Comments
I was left with questions and no way to get answers to them. Will I be paid through the 14th of March? How do I return the equipment that the agency issued to me? Fortunately, having learned to weather gaps between contracts, I maintain a reserve fund sufficient to cover a couple of month’s expenses. However, although I tried to contact the Georgia unemployment office several times, I do not know if I am eligible for unemployment insurance because I was dismissed for “inadequate performance.”
Future Plans
I would come back to CDC in a heartbeat because I get so much satisfaction from helping people.s I plan to look for other jobs, but my situation has left me dealing with shock, disappointment, panic, and dread. These emotions have made it hard to concentrate right now, to create a new resume, and to get back into the job market. I also realize I’ll be joining thousands of displaced Federal workers who are now looking for work.