INSIGHT & INSPIRATION FROM APHA’S 2012 MIDYEAR MEETING

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Survive All In This Friends Prevention, Strategies
& Thrive Together For Health Opportunity & Equity for Health
The nation is becoming home to more screens and smaller screens. If what you’re creating
doesn’t look good on a small screen, you might be wasting your time, Bernhardt said. (He noted
that he’d previously seen a presentation by Google’s chief technology officer who predicted that
in the coming years, 95 percent of all Internet searches will be via mobile devices.)
So, what does it all mean for public health? Bernhardt took to the 10 essential public health
services to show how new media and communication fit — and are already fitting — into each
category. For example, in monitoring disease and health status, public health workers can mine
social media sites, like Twitter, to see who and where people are reporting symptoms and talking
about illness. In mobilizing partnerships, public health can help keep members active via
online activities. And in the world of health promotion and education...well, the possibilities are
nearly endless.
“Health promotion folks are all over the new media space,” Bernhardt said.
He ended his presentation with a powerful analogy to John Snow, the British doctor often referred
to as the father of modern epidemiology and famous for tracking the source of an 1850s
cholera outbreak to a water pump. If he were alive today, Bernhardt said, he probably would
have detected the cholera epidemic via an uptick in bar code scanning data for toilet paper and
Kaopectate. He’d use the info to help pinpoint certain geographic hotspots and look for Twitterers
complaining of gastrointestinal distress. He’d examine data coming out of health care
settings and check Foursquare to see who checked in at the suspicious water pump. And then
he’d send out his own tweets on Twitter (along with a specialized Twitter hashtag) telling his
followers to stop drinking the contaminated water.
From session 3001, Engaging Fans, Followers and Friends: Using Social Media for Improving Health,
June 28
STEPS FOR ACTION:
• ADVOCATE for public
health and learn how to do
it effectively. Even if you’re a
public employee, there are
ways you can support public
health. As a constituent, you
can make a difference, but
you have to make your voice
heard.
• EMBRACE new health
information technologies and
use them to leverage public
health skills and systems to
expand the field’s reach.
• MAKE social media
your friend. Online and
mobile communications
and networking hold huge
potential for helping to
improve people’s health, and
public health can’t be on the
cutting edge without it.