America by Design Initiative Sets ‘North Star’ for Federal UX

The White House’s recently launched America by Design initiative — which established a National Design Studio (NDS) and the nation’s first Chief Design Officer role — serves as a guide for federal agencies as leaders modernize digital experiences, senior IT officials said Tuesday at the 2025 GovCIO Media & Research Health IT Summit in Rockville, Maryland.

Patrick Newbold, CIO and OIT Director at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the newly established chief design officer is “critical to establish a North Star for all of federal government.”

Newbold added, “We as customers and consumers of federal services don’t necessarily like to see a disjointed federal experience. We simply want an experience and a service that just works for us. I think this position can galvanize the federal government to provide seamless and integrated services across the ecosystem.”

The NDS, created in August 2025, is designed to work with agencies to standardize design practices across service providers, hire top talent and develop innovative solutions to improve federal user experience.

Monica Rosser, executive managing director of federal health at Maximus, said that customers expect government services to mirror industry standards.

“Frictionless, seamless customer experience is the absolute baseline now. Folks are expecting a customer experience akin to what they’re seeing in the commercial space,” Rosser said.

She added that industry needs to build systems for government that reuse tools and are portable.

“Enough with the huge monolithic systems. We’re leaning into microservices. We are leaning into portable modular technology now. We need to be reusable. We need to be able to be building like that,” Rosser told the audience.

Nadia Smith, acting chief digital health officer at the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), said codifying the Veterans Experience Office into law this summer emphasized the government’s desire to improve digital experiences at all agencies.

Smith said the VHA has prioritized soliciting feedback from veterans first and foremost, but the agency is also focusing on clinician and provider needs.

“It’s important to us to make sure, as we’re delivering and building products and services, that we’re looking at it from a holistic perspective, not just from a patient experience perspective, but also from a clinical perspective,” Smith said during the event.

Smith pointed to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ upcoming ambient scribe dictation pilots, which will use artificial intelligence to record and summarize conversations between clinicians and patients. VA officials confirmed to congressional leaders this month that the first pilots will launch at 10 facilities by the end of 2025.

“It’s very important to us when we’re working with our veterans, who span multi-generations, to really understand their comfort level when it comes to this type of AI technology especially in a clinical encounter,” Smith said. “We want to make sure that we’ve got the right protocols in place as we’re deploying this exciting tool for our providers.”

John Giannini, health science policy analyst at the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us program, pointed to technology like agentic AI and large language models that can help support centers respond to participant questions faster.

Giannini said AI can help participants in NIH’s research efforts produce richer, higher quality data faster.

“On the participant side, we’re trying to streamline the digital journey when they’re enrolling with us so they can easily process our documents and provide some data if they wish,” Giannini said. “On the researcher side, we’re trying to help researchers leverage our data to make precision medicine and push healthcare forward.”

Newbold emphasized that standard, high quality services must exist throughout government and that information sharing between agencies is the best way to achieve the goal.

“People generally don’t see the government in pieces. I think a key piece when it comes to partnership is the ability to have those partnerships and share data across the different organizations that have different needs but definitely are connected,” Newbold said.