Section III: Steps Taken to Increase Proactive Disclosures

The Department of Justice has long focused on the need for agencies to work proactively to post information online without waiting for individual requests to be received.

Please answer the following questions to describe the steps your agency has taken to increase the amount of material that is available on your agency websites. In addition to the questions below, you should also describe any additional steps taken by your agency to make and improve proactive disclosures of information.

1. Provide examples of any material that your agency has proactively disclosed during the past reporting year, including records that have been requested and released three or more times in accordance with 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(2)(D). Please include links to these materials as well.

COVID-19 Proactive Disclosures

HHS worked closely with its federal partners and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments, public health officials, health care providers, researchers, private sector organizations and the public to execute a whole-of-America response to the COVID-19 pandemic to protect the health and safety of the American people. HHS Digital Communications led the Federal Government response with CDC.gov/coronavirus becoming the top federal government website for many months, getting more than 2 billion page views. HHS Digital Communications coordinated response across all key department websites and with the Federal Web Council, directing a coordinated Federal Communications Response with the Department of Homeland Security through the Emergency Response for Communications.

HHS partnered with Army to proactively post contracts related to Operation Warp Speed. The contracts can be found in the HHS Reading Room, under OWS Proactive Releases - https://www.hhs.gov/foia/electronic-reading-room/index.html

HHS has also posted additional COVID related contracts - https://www.hhs.gov/coronavirus/contracts/index.html

HHS ASPA Digital Team worked extensively with HRSA to publish CARES Act Provider Relief Funding Data - https://www.hhs.gov/coronavirus/cares-act-provider-relief-fund/data/index.html

Some of the actions HRSA took to provide information about COVID-19 https://www.hrsa.gov/coronavirus that includes:

  • Standing up a website for the Uninsured Program
  • Building webpages for HRSA's overall COVID response
  • Posting updated health center testing data every week for months
  • Continuously providing proactive information on social media
  • Posting multiple press announcements on HRSA program awards for COVID-19

CDC posted COVID records requested without regard to the rule of three. We have also posted FOIA Request Logs https://www.cdc.gov/od/foia/reading/index.htm

CMS proactively posts their FOIA logs on a monthly basis - https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Legislation/FOIA/rdgroom

FDA has continued its commitment to proactive disclosure during the reporting period, particularly with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, FDA has proactively posted Emergency Use Authorization records for several COVID-19 vaccines and therapies (https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-legal-regulatory-and-policy-framework/emergency-use-authorization). In addition, please see:

IHS Posted 2020 Urban Indian Organization Contract Amounts to the IHS eFOIA Reading Room located on the IHS website at: https://www.ihs.gov/FOIA/readingroom/. This step was taken after it was noted by FOIA staff that this was an annual request submitted at the beginning of each Fiscal year (tracking back to the previous 5 FYs). Publication created a more efficient and effective method for responding to this annual request. As other similar annual/recurring requests are identified, they will also be evaluated for eFOIA Reading Room publication.

HRSA continues to post the Universal Data Set (UDS) report, which contains the data reported by over 1,300 HRSA-funded Federally Qualified Community Health Centers (FQHCs). Every FQHC must file an annual UDS report made up of 14 highly detailed tables with approximately 20,000 data points. This past year provided clear evidence of the efficiency that can result from such disclosures. The link to the Reading Room is https://www.hrsa.gov/foia/electronic-reading.html

The Reading Room page also lists the HTML links for several of HRSA's most requested databases and programs. These include the HRSA Data Warehouse, the National Practitioner Data Bank, the Office of Pharmacy Affairs 340B Database, and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program Data and Statistics. In addition, it contains links to a wide assortment of other related databases, health center policy statements, and announcements of HRSA funding opportunities.

The National Institutes of Health reported the following proactive disclosures:

CSR:

  • We recently completed an evaluation of the scope of scientific review groups (ENQUIRE 2019); the process and results were posted and discoverable by search and by browsing via multiple paths.
  • CSR Advisory Council meets in September and March of each year. The attendees and council members, agenda, meeting minutes, presentations, reports, and links to the videocast are posted on our Advisory Council web page. In addition to posting the link to the full videocast, the meeting minutes have direct links to specific points in the video cast in order to make it easier for the public to navigate to discussions of interest to them (e.g. Sept 2020 CSRAC Meeting Minutes).
  • Initiatives undertaken by CSR are also publicized through the Review Matters blog. The posts usually contain highlights related to a CSR initiative as well as links to more detailed reports. For example, we posted a blog on changes made to our Early Career Reviewer Program (Review Matters 15 Nov 2019) and the post included a link to a detailed report about the data and input considered.
  • The information most often sought by the public is rosters for scientific review groups. We make this information discoverable through the search on our web site and by browsing via multiple avenues. Rosters are posted on study section description pages (e.g., Arthritis, Connective Tissue and Skin Study Section) and under Review Panels & Dates, where the first click takes a user to a roster search page (Find Meeting Rosters). Both "Study Sections" and "Review Panels & Dates" are top level menu items that are present on the landing page and on every page as one navigates through our web site.

FIC:

NCATS:

The following information is updated frequently:

NCCIH:

  • We do have an "In the News" portion of our website (https://www.nccih.nih.gov/news) where we post information on emerging topic areas that are getting covered in the media and another place where we link to FDA alerts and advisories (https://www.nccih.nih.gov/news/alerts), but all of this is generally publicly available information.

NCI:

NEI:

NHLBI:

NIA:

NIAAA:

NIBIB:

Also, in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic NIBIB added a COVID-19 section to its website with information about funding opportunities for researchers and industry, data related to specific projects, and summaries of research projects. See links below.

NIDA:

NIEHS:

NIMH:

Current NIMH-funded research findings, such as:

Institute Updates and Research Highlights on important research topics such as:

Using social media, NIMH pushed out a variety of messages on:

NINDS:

NINR:

  • NINR recently added a "Preventing Infections in Multiple Healthcare Settings" https://www.ninr.nih.gov/newsandinformation/newsandnotes/infection-control special feature to its website that highlights research on health care-associated infections (HAIs). The new page illustrates how research led by nurse scientists on infection control has helped provide a foundation of evidence and guided best practices in multiple clinical settings.
  • NINR has also developed a webpage showcasing the Omics Nursing Science & Education Network (ONSEN) https://www.ninr.nih.gov/researchandfunding/onsen The purpose of ONSEN is to assist those interested in including omics in their program of nursing research. The creation of this resource network was recommended by leaders from the nurse scientist community who wanted to enable collaboration, mentoring, and access to training opportunities.

2. Beyond posting new material, is your agency taking steps to make the posted information more useful to the public, especially to the community of individuals who regularly access your agency's website?

Yes.

3. If yes, please provide examples of such improvements. In particular, please describe steps your agency is taking to post information in open, machine-readable, and machine-actionable formats, to the extent feasible. If not posting in open formats, please explain why and note any challenges.

  • HHS began using Pagefreezer, which allows the public to see past iterations of HHS web content.
  • HHS uses social media to include more than 800 social media sites.
  • The FDA Commissioner writes a blog on high visibility issues (https://blogs.fda.gov/fdavoice/)
  • FDA posts high priority public information on the homepage of the agency website, https://www.fda.gov/default.htm.
  • The FDA provides the public with the ability to subscribe to RSS feed notices or sign up to receive automated emails for updates to over 100 different web pages/databases (see http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/ContactFDA/StayInformed/GetEmailUpdates/default.htm).
  • NIH has ensured that cross-agency review platform generates 508-compliant content.

4. Optional -- Please describe:

Best practices used to improve proactive disclosures

Any challenges your agency faces in this area

Content created by Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Division
Content last reviewed