What happened

On June 30, 2026, the New York Times reported that the National Institutes of Health announced what it's calling the world's largest integrated health database - a platform pulling together health data at a scale that hasn't really been attempted before.

The database the article describes is the NIH's All of Us research program, which set out to compile health data on populations that have historically been underrepresented in modern scientific datasets - so that future research and care better reflect everyone, not just the groups medicine has traditionally studied.

Seeing something you contributed to land on the front page of the Times is a surreal, humbling feeling. Projects like this are the work of a lot of people across a lot of disciplines, over a long time - researchers, engineers, clinicians, policy folks, and designers all pulling in the same direction.

Where I fit in

This was during my time at Color Health, one of the technology partners in the All of Us program, where I helped build out the online genomics platform. I contributed on the design engineering side, across a few areas of the participant experience:

• Results experiences - I helped build out the pages that explain participants' genetic test and ancestry results, turning complex, sensitive information into something people can actually read and understand.
• Scheduling - I helped build the scheduling UI so participants could book appointments with genetic counselors to walk through those results with a real human.
• Accessibility - I single-handedly completed an accessibility audit across the genomics platform's main flows, then organized and drove the fixes to resolve 300+ adverse findings. Later, the program's Director shared that the NIH had found hundreds of accessibility bugs across its technology partners - but our platform had zero. 🎉
• Validating with real users - I later collaborated with user research to test the UI with blind and low-vision participants. Their feedback was some of the most rewarding I've ever gotten, including one comment I won't forget: "Someone knew about accessibility when they built this."

That accessibility work is the part I'm proudest of. When you're building something people have to trust with their health data, making it usable for everyone isn't a nice-to-have - it's the whole responsibility.

Being even a small part of something with this kind of reach is exactly why I do this. Good design engineering is quiet: it shows up as things that feel obvious, safe, and clear - and that's the point.

Dig deeper

I've written more about the accessibility work behind this:

• A11y Audit Program @ Color Health → - my case study on standing up the audit program and clearing the findings.
• We used UX research after an accessibility audit - here's what happened → - published on Color's design blog on Medium, on validating the work with real blind and low-vision users.

Read the announcement

The full story is worth a read - it does a great job of capturing the scale and the stakes:

• NIH announces the world's largest integrated health database → (The New York Times)