In October 2013, as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), was launching Healthcare.gov, CMS also launched a quieter initiative. As part of Ignite, an internal HHS program designed to spur innovation, a team within CMS’s press office designed a system to help CMS communicate more quickly and efficiently with the press. The team envisioned that such a system, if functioning well, could also improve CMS’s portrayal in the media.  As project leader Emma Sandoe, CMS’s Medicaid spokesperson, put in her presentation of the team’s report to other CMS employees, “no one likes to watch the Daily Show make fun of HHS and our job here in the press office is to make sure that doesn’t happen as often as it sometimes does.”

The CMS team called their project the Coordinated Press Response Strategy.  In her presentation, Sandoe noted the irony of the project’s launch coinciding with that of Healthcare.gov: “We launched this tool in the month of October, which – you may have heard [laughter] we also launched a little website, Healthcare.gov…”