Kaiser Family Foundation Launches All New kff.org

MENLO PARK, Calif., May 6, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Kaiser Family Foundation today announced the launch of an all new kff.org, the Foundation's popular web destination for its health policy information. The new kff.org has been designed to fit the way people currently access and consume online information, and is built on an open-source platform that can rapidly evolve to incorporate the latest advances in online communication.

In redesigning kff.org, the Foundation consolidated five websites and gateways developed over the last decade to provide a single point of entry to the Foundation's diverse information resources.  (The foundation will maintain a separate site for Kaiser Health News (KHN), its nonprofit health news service.) The new kff.org will provide a streamlined experience centered around 10 major health policy topics, with content continually updated on the home page, topic pages and throughout the site to reflect both current health policy issues as well as the Foundation's latest resources.  All content on a topic – whether a fact sheet, poll, slide, data table, video or infographic or KHN news report – will be integrated for one-stop viewing.

Developed in partnership with WordPress.com VIP, the website showcases a new faceted search engine, developed specifically for kff.org, which provides a shopping-like experience to users who can refine searches by attributes like date, topics, tags, and type of content.  The site also utilizes the latest techniques to optimize viewing on tablets and smartphones.  Users of the new website will be able to access graphics, information and data from the newest Kaiser reports more easily thanks to a newly designed format no longer constrained by PDFs that is easy to read and interact with on all devices. 

"The Kaiser Family Foundation always strives to provide the best information on health policy issues," said KFF President and Chief Executive Officer Drew Altman.  "The new kff.org puts our online information together in a much simpler and more engaging way for the many audiences who rely on us every day."

"We're very excited to have the Kaiser Family Foundation's newly redesigned site on WordPress.com VIP, delivering a great experience on the desktop web, tablet, and mobile.  Kff.org breaks new ground in bringing faceted search to a WordPress site, powered by VIP-hosted Elasticsearch.  I'm impressed with KFF's commitments and contributions to open source, and looking forward to their continued involvement with these communities," said Raanan Bar-Cohen, Senior Vice President at Automattic.

Using an innovative custom plug-in for WordPress, kff.org users can now interact with state and global data tables, maps, and trend graphs on health issues (previously found on statehealthfacts.org and globalhealthfacts.org) alongside related fact sheets, briefs and reports, rather than needing to visit separate Foundation sites to find different types of information on the same topic. 

Many existing resources have been refreshed for the new platform, including quizzes, timelines, slides and other interactive tools.  Slideshows and chartpacks from new Kaiser polls have gone social and can be shared using an embeddable viewer from Slideshare, providing a wider audience with easy access to the Foundation's resources.    

The Kaiser Family Foundation, a leader in health policy analysis, health journalism and communication, is dedicated to filling the need for trusted, independent information on the major health issues facing our nation and its people. The Foundation is a non-profit private operating foundation, based in Menlo Park, California.

Automattic offers a network of web services for online publishers including WordPress.com, VIP hosting and support, VaultPress, Akismet, VideoPress, Jetpack, Simplenote,  Gravatar, and more. The Automattic network attracts over 650 million worldwide unique visitors every month.

SOURCE Kaiser Family Foundation