New Healthcare.gov Is Open, CMS-Free

HHS CTO Bryan Sivak previews details and vision for relaunch of the high-profile government website

At a South by Southwest event this weekend, Department of Heath and Human Services CTO Bryan Sivak outlined a new vision for healthcare.gov. As the primary interface for the public to learn about and shop for health insurance plans through the Health Insurance Marketplace, healthcare.gov will relaunch this June with a completely rethought design and architecture.

The new healthcare.gov follows our CMS-free philosophy. It will be a completely static website, generated by Jekyll, moving away from content management systems, which Bryan describes as "complicated to configure, complicated to setup, and add unnecessary overhead." Website generators like Jekyll work by combining template files with content and rendering them to static html pages. They provide the best balance between content creation and editing flexibility, serving an incredibly fast and reliable website.