American Heart Association

The problem

The American Heart Association’s National Hypertension Control Initiative (NHCI) was a federally funded program focused on improving blood pressure control in the communities hit hardest by hypertension. Its digital home, nhci.heart.org, had to do several jobs at once: publish health education content in multiple languages, deliver structured training to health professionals, and help patients find participating community health centers near them, all on a platform stable enough to serve millions of visitors for a high-visibility national brand.

That’s a lot of surface area for one site: multilingual editorial workflows, an LMS, location-based search, and the constant stream of content changes and fixes that a live program generates.

The approach

The platform was a WordPress multisite, one site per language, running a custom theme with ACF-driven Gutenberg blocks and an SCSS/Gulp build pipeline.

I joined a team of developers working on bug fixes, new Gutenberg blocks, and customizations to the LearnDash LMS that powered the professional training content. Over time I became the lead developer on the account, owning the technical direction and the features that mattered most to the program.

The largest of those was a health centers directory: a custom search that takes a zip code and radius, geocodes it, and returns participating health centers both as a list and plotted on an interactive map via the Google Maps API. For someone trying to find hypertension care nearby, that search was the bridge between the program’s content and actual treatment.

Beyond the code, I acted as the technical lead in stakeholder meetings, translating program asks into scoped, buildable work, and owned ongoing maintenance of the platform end to end.

The outcome

The site served millions of visitors over the life of the program, in multiple languages, without drama. The health center directory gave the initiative something most awareness campaigns lack: a direct path from “learn about hypertension” to “here’s where to get checked, near you.”

When federal funding for the program was cut, the initiative was wound down and nhci.heart.org was redirected to heart.org. The platform ran reliably through to the end of its mission.