From the Director

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February 22, 2011

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This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Health Communication Research Laboratory, a milestone that would never have been possible without the hard work and great ideas of so many talented people. Our longevity and success is a direct tribute to the 300+ students, faculty and staff who have worked to make our Center a national leader creating innovative solutions to health communication challenges.
     We started in 1996 with pioneering efforts to tailor health information using computer technology. By 2000, we had shifted our focus to applying tailoring to help eliminate health disparities. This era included path-breaking work in cultural tailoring for African American populations and message framing around health disparities.
     Most recently, research at the HCRL is exploring ways to increase the social impact of health communication. We are now studying the effects of integrating evidence-based approaches into systems that serve low-income and minority populations. Among the projects you’ll see in this report:

• The My 2-1-1 project is connecting people who call a state help line for assistance with food, rent and bills to cancer prevention services.
• The Ozioma News Service, in collaboration with the American Cancer Society, placed more than 100 localized cancer news stories in African-American newspapers around the country. An on-line version of the news service won an award for innovation from the National Cancer Institute.
• Our online MIYO (Make It Your Own) system has been adapted for use by 29 states and tribal organizations in CDC’s Colorectal Cancer Control Program. MIYO enables users to customize their own evidence-based resources to increase colorectal cancer screening.

     What’s next? We must do a better job getting research-tested solutions into widespread use to improve the public’s health and eliminate health disparities. This challenge is hardly new, but the HCRL approach to addressing it is. We believe a new system that includes user review, design and marketing teams, and dissemination field agents is needed to help make scientific discoveries accessible, useful and responsive to the needs of practice organizations. We’re already busy building and testing parts of the system. Meeting this challenge will help us to extend our reach – and our vision – well into the next 15 years.


Sincerely,
Matt