Dickie Wallace, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, United States Lisa Gualtieri*, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, United States Track: Research Presentation Topic: Building virtual communities and social networking applications for patients and consumers Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2012-06-20

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Background: State Departments of Public Health (DPH) have three foremost goals: to serve as directories for health information and services, to make available ongoing health education for citizens and to provide alerts for urgent health-related information. While unprecedented unidirectional and reciprocal digital communication is possible through the web, social media, and mobile, many state DPHs make minimal use – or even no use – of these technologies and thus fall far short of their potential for outreach.

Objective: Our objective is to comprehensively catalog web, social media, and mobile use by state DPHs in order to determine which technologies they use, and which are used effectively, leading to an overall picture of technology use and to best practices that DPHs can learn from and emulate.

Methods: We surveyed 54 state, district, and territorial DPHs in the U.S. using laptop computers and mobile phones to assess the web, social media, and mobile presence of each using a total of 36 categories.

Research-in-Progress: Results: DPHs, as viewed via the web, are inconsistent from one state to the next in what they offer their population and how they offer it. Some departments concentrate more on the means of contacting various branches of their systems, while others provide health educational tools. Few state DPHs have readily apparent contingencies in place for addressing sudden public health emergencies through prominently placed alerts. Furthermore, few DPHs have created mobile-specific content by means of streamlined websites easily viewable by mobile browsers or actual mobile apps. More frequent are sites laid out for wide desktop screens, often providing redundant information.

Use of popular forms of social media is common, with 70% of DPHs having regularly updated Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. However, their reach, as measured by followers and relative Klout scores of social media use, are limited. Every DPH website gives links to access video content, but what this accesses varies widely: some DPHs have embedded video health messages, but one DPH only has links for requesting DVDs via postal mail.

Research-in-Progress: Conclusions
Comparing the digital presence of state DPHs side-by-side in a comprehensive catalog is instructive to identify best practices in web presentation and categorization as well as find those DPHs that use social media to communicate with their citizenry. This process also shows that the digital presence of many DPHs appears to reflect the internal logic of their organizations and the ad hoc practices therein, while the ultimate target audience, the citizenry, is left with difficult to navigate and sometimes obfuscated information. With mobile device use increasing, a DPH would have difficulty in addressing a sudden major health crisis if the majority of information seekers could barely navigate their sites.

When considering best practices, one has to recognize what can be done within the budget constraints of most state governmental departments. Therefore, this project seeks to explain how departments can better allocate resources for the integration of their web, social media, and mobile to in order maximize opportunities to connect with their publics.