A New Look for RAND COMPARE

The RAND COMPARE web site recently upgraded its performance and delivery capabilities, and assessed and refined the tools that provide the most value to users. 

Infrastructure upgrades were made to provide the web site with a faster, more powerful server.  Web site content was transferred into Drupal, a feature-rich content management system that offers enhanced stability as well as flexibility in how we present information.  Minor design updates were also added to bring uniformity and increase ease of use.

New features have been added to allow users to more quickly find and save the information that is most important to them.  For example, our new "Custom Reports" section offers users the capability of extracting reports on single or multiple policy options, performance dimensions, and legislative proposals.  When logged in, users can save those reports, and most of our other data, directly to their My COMPARE personal folder for future retrieval and sharing. Our Analysis of Options dashboard and Proposals dashboards now provide users with checkboxes that let them quickly parse large amounts of data to create custom side-by-side comparisons.  These can then be reviewed and saved in the default dashboard view or in a print detail view.

We have made an effort to link related data together, giving context and hopefully providing deeper meaning.  For example, our Policy Options section describes each of the main health care reform policy options but it also incorporates, there on the same page, the effects of these policy options on the core health care system performance dimensions.  At a glance, users can learn more about the policy option and see its impact.

Most of the web pages can now be shared using the new "Share" icon.  Popular social sharing services, such as Facebook, del.icio.us, and Digg have been included.  RAND COMPARE has launched a twitter account where subscribers can follow our updates and postings from the convenience of their twitter-ready devices.  

These and other enhancements have been implemented in an effort to increase ease of user engagement with our content, to clarify its meaning, and to help promote RAND findings.  We hope you agree that these goals have been reached, and we welcome feedback  on our new site.  

Respectfully,

The RAND COMPARE Team

General Email: compare@rand.org
Technical Issues: comparetech@rand.org