Local health departments find Twitter effective in spreading diabetes information | Newsroom | Washington University in St. Louis

Local health departments find Twitter effective in spreading diabetes information | Newsroom | Washington University in St. Louis


The web-based social media site Twitter is proving to be an effective tool for local health departments in disseminating health information — especially in promoting specific health behaviors.

Harris

The latest study, led by Jenine K. Harris, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, focused on diabetes, a disease that may affect an estimated one-third of U.S. adults by 2050.


“We focused on diabetes first, both because of increasing diabetes rates,” Harris says, “and also because people living with diabetes tend to use online health-related resources at a fairly high rate, so they are an audience that is already online and on social media.”

The study was published May 2 in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) electronic journal, Preventing Chronic Disease, and focused on how local health departments use social media to educate and inform the public about diabetes.

Read more at https://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/25413.aspx.

Health ownership in American Indigenous communities

Although the Indian Health Service (IHS) has adequately stifled acute infectious diseases that once devastated American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) communities, this system of health provision has become obsolete in the face of chronically debilitating illnesses. Presently, AIAN communities suffer disproportionally from chronic diseases that demand adequate, long-term health maintenance such as hepatitis, renal failure, and diabetes to name a few. A number of research endeavors have sought to define this problem in the literature, but few have proposed adequate mechanisms to alleviate the disparity. The objective of this study was to examine the efficacy of both the Indian Health Service (IHS) and the relative few tribal healthcare systems (PL 93-638) respectively in their sociopolitical contexts, to determine their utility among a financially lame IHS. Click here to read the full paper. 

Better Health: Evaluating Health Communication (lecture 3 or 5)

Additional Information:
http://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?live=12683&bhcp=1

Description:
There are more and increasingly diverse ways for health information to reach the public. The interest among Americans to receive health information also remains high compared to most other topics. To maximize the impact of health information on the nation’s well-being and empower consumers, communicators need to know whether their messages are reaching the right audience, whether the information is understood, and whether the materials make a difference in decision-making and health outcomes. As a result, evaluation is an integral and crucial part of health communication.

NLM is presenting this lecture series to highlight innovative approaches and best practices in evaluating health communication. As NIH and NLM diversify their use of mass communication channels to dispatch health information, a fresh consideration of evaluation’s cutting edge is timely and important. This is part 3 in a 5 part series.

Andrew Pleasant, PhD, Health Literacy and Research Director, Canyon Ranch Institute, Tucson, Arizona, and faculty member, The Ohio State University College of Nursing. A pioneer in health literacy research and evaluation, Dr. Pleasant is a member of the Institute of Medicine's Roundtable on Health Literacy and the Scientific Committee of the International Public Communication of Science and Technology Network.