My Most Meaningful Health Communication Artifact
By Mike Mackert
This semester I’m teaching an honors seminar in health communication through the College of Natural Sciences. It’s been a great opportunity to engage with exceptionally bright students who are interested in careers in various health professions.
As part of the class, I’ve asked each student to present on a health communication “artifact” which they find to be interesting. It could be a research article, a TV ad, an episode of a show with a health theme, or really anything else they think is interesting. Each student has to answer three questions:
- Why is it interesting?
- What did you learn from it?
- What does it mean for you going forward?
This, of course, prompted me to think about what the most important health communication artifact would be for me. The answer was simple: the Diabetes and You website that I worked on as a grad student. The site was developed in 2005 or so, and it definitely shows its age at this point.
But working on the project where we designed and evaluated that site, which was developed as an educational intervention for lower health literate population, was one of the most important experiences of my professional career.
That site helped me discover my research focus. At the time I was working on the project, I would have said it was about the technology. Thinking about it a little more, though, it was the health communication problem and research opportunity of how to develop content that would be useful to lower health literate populations. That’s been the foundation of my research ever since.
I would also say that thinking about the framework of that intervention (which was more about education) led me to consider other things that are needed for effective health communication – engagement, better visual design, etc. – which I’ve been pursuing ever since.
I don’t know all the projects the future might hold. If the current work of the CHC – ranging from opioids to tobacco control to bystander intervention – is any guide, it will definitely be busy and meaningful. But I’ll always look back on that Diabetes and You intervention as the health communication artifact which most shaped my own work.