The Sickle Cell Information Center website, www.scinfo.org began in 1997, shortly after internet communication took off. Founded by James R. Eckman, MD, Professor of Hematology and Medical Oncology at the Winship Cancer Institute and Professor of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics in Medical Genetics at Emory University School of Medicine, and Allan Platt, PA-C, MMSc, DFAAPA, Academic Coordinator and Director of Admissions for the Emory University Physician Assistant Program, https://scinfo.org has been the leading web-based resource for information about sickle cell disease for the past twenty years.

The website is widely used, both throughout the United States and around the globe, regularly averaging 13,500 hits per month, and over 150,000 per year. When Dr. Eckman retired in 2013, after three remarkable decades of work developing the Comprehensive Sickle Cell Program at Grady Health and caring for thousands of patients in the Atlanta area, Allan Platt continued to maintain www.scinfo.org.

Now, we are pleased to announce that the site has been completely reorganized with a new format, fresh images, and revised text. A collaborative interdisciplinary team of scholars drawn from the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the Rollins School of Public Health, and the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA) completed this work. Both Dr. Eckman and Allan Platt have been involved in the re-design and we have taken care to leave many familiar aspects of the original website in place so that patients, families, educators, employers, and healthcare providers can access what they need with ease. Generous support for revising the website came from the University Research Committee (URC) of Emory University, from the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award, and from the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. We are grateful for the opportunity made possible by this funding and proud to build on the excellent work started by Eckman and Platt so many years ago.

As always, www.scinfo.org is committed to providing sickle cell patients and their families and health care providers with professional education, news, research updates and access to up-to-date sickle cell resources worldwide. New features of the site include daily postings of new PubMed articles, links to recent articles from news outlets across the web, additional multilingual resources for patients, families and health care providers, listings of state, national and international sickle cell organizations, and an expanding list of global resources on sickle cell disease. Clinical guidelines are being up updated and will soon be available.  The site maintains the privacy of all individuals and no information is gathered. The site is not supported by and does not accept advertising requests. Content and responses are reviewed by the Center Advisory Board. And finally, Information provided on this site is designed to support, not replace, the relationship that exists between a patient/site visitor and his/her physician.

In addition to thanking the institutions that supported this effort, it is important to recognize the work of Mary E. Frederickson, PhD, Clinton H. Joiner, MD, PhD, Peter A. Lane, MD, James R. Eckman, MD, Allan Platt, Allen Tullos, PhD, Wayne H. Morse, Jr., Erin Hecht, PhD, Mekdes Tsegas, Lauren McNaughton, Chase Lovellette, Adrya Stembridge. We also thank the following individuals and institutions for giving us permission to use images and materials from their collections:  Oregon State University, Hertz Nazaire, Ellen Weinstein, and the Estate of Twins Seven Seven.

We hope you enjoy the changes that have been made and the continuity that the site provides. We welcome comments and suggestions for more revisions, so let us know what you think.