The Future Is Now: New Perspectives from Members of the Council for Quality Health Communication

In December 2023, a number of independent health communications professionals, including practitioners, academic researchers, and several members of the editorial board of the Journal of Health Communication, met at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law Center in Washington DC to form a Council for Health Quality Communication (www.qualityhealthcommunication.org). The Council, which now has more than 50 members, met specifically to discuss ways of addressing issues arising from the recent, rapid increase in mis/disinformation and loss of trust in health and science, which have profoundly affected public health and policy, as well as the health of individuals, families, and communities.

The Council has adopted a formal mission to advance and advocate for the science and practice of health communication based on foundations of health literacy and the use of evidence-based communication and media technologies to foster a culture of trust and understanding between the health and scientific communities and the public

In the first few months of 2024, the Council quickly established its presence as a health communication advocate, publishing multi-authored articles in Annals of Internal Medicine, The Hill, and STAT, and holding symposia on responding to anti-science attacks and confronting misinformation strategically at the annual meeting of the Consortium of Universities in Global Health. In addition, the Council has initiated a collaboration with the Coalition for Trust in Health & Science (www.trustinhealthandscience.org), to develop, test, scale, operationalize, and evaluate unique interventions designed to improve the communication skills of health workers and build health literacy and trust among patients and consumers.

At its first meeting, the Council’s co-founder Scott Ratzan, also offered members of the group an opportunity to share their perspectives on urgent issues in health communication in short articles for publication in the Journal of Health Communication. We are pleased to present here the first four of these Perspectives, all of which perhaps not surprisingly point out that the future of our profession is now. The authors suggest we must confront this challenge simultaneously with increased technical savvy and greater empathy for our audiences while doing a better job of protecting ourselves from cyber attacks, threats, and bullying and concomitantly opening our ranks more quickly to the thinking and energy of new generations.

Burke-Garcia & Soskin Hicks remind us that the genies of social media and AI neither cannot nor should not be put back in their bottle and provides us with a provocative approach they call “Health Communication AI” that “blends the authenticity of social media influencers with AI’s technological scale capabilities informed by accurate and up-to-date health- and health communication-related expertise.” Effectively, we must find a way to channel AI to extend our traditional concept of trusted information sources to a new “phase of opinion leadership for today’s digital world.

In her article, “Precious information: getting interpretable, actionable health communications data,” Lanthorn et al. tell us the story of Precious, a young Kenyan woman who wakes up with a persistent cough and consults many sources of information, personal, and institutional, to decide what to do about it. The authors suggest that when health communication researchers survey people like Precious to learn about their information seeking behaviors, we must keep in mind that their health and their time should also be precious to us: “We owe it to the people from whom we collect data to use their time well, and to gather information we can interpret and use. Further, we owe it to research funders to collect information that moves beyond ‘interesting’ to being actionable. The public health challenges we face are large and require thoughtful intervention. To develop … high-quality health communications and behavior-change initiatives, high-quality data are precious.”

In their article “From Theory to Practice: Mitigating the Harm of Online Harassment in Public Health” Mendez et al. reflect on their own experiences with on-line harassment and then apply “the theoretical framework of the networked public to understand the dynamics of online harassment of public health professionals.” They conclude by “emphasizing the need to build a more proactive approach to online harassment and … highlight recommendations that health communicators can take in the face of online harassment, [including] … a more coordinated community effort to create supportive environments for online health communication, … increased funding of local health departments and increased regulation of social media companies.”

Piltch-Loeb et al. focus their attention very specifically on millennials as both receivers and senders of health messages. They suggest that efforts to engage youth to date have fallen short, and that, “By engaging youth in ongoing work around social media, AI, and information disorder, researchers and policymakers can draw on young people’s lived experiences with the shifting information landscape and recognize their roles as future leaders of the next digital environment.” Just as our Council has made a concerted effort to include several generations of health communicators in its membership, the authors remind us that, “the youth voice may be able to augment and articulate different factors that have not yet been considered in addressing information disorder.”