[MUSIC] Hi, this is Tanjala Purnell. I am one of the course codirectors. I am also an assistant professor here in the Hopkins School of Medicine, with a joint faculty appointment in the School of Public Health. >> Hi, I'm Macey Henderson. I'm an assistant professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, with a joint appointment in the School of Nursing. >> Today we will be talking to you about best practices for using digital and social media to engage stakeholders and disseminate health equity research. In the first half of this lecture, we will provide examples of innovative strategies that we have used to engage stakeholders in health equity research at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity. Many of these same strategies can be adopted in other settings, and work to promote health equity. This slide highlights the core faculty investigators and staff members affiliated with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity. We also have about 25 active trainees at the center. Now, I'm sure your first reaction to this slide may be, wow, this is a large team of people. Your second reaction is probably, how do we engage all of these team members? In addition to the faculty, staff, and trainees at the center, we also have strong partnerships with other stakeholders. These stakeholder partners include individual patients, family members, and local community members. As well as representatives of various organizations, such as the American Diabetes Association, the Baltimore City Health Department, and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield. Stakeholder engagement is critical to the success of health equity research interventions, and their sustainability long after the study is over. And several of our stakeholder partners are highlighted on the slide. Again, you may be wondering, how do we engage all of these stakeholders at the center? We use a community-based participatory research, or CBPR, approach to meaningfully involve and build on the strengths of our stakeholder partners in all phases of the research. All partners share their expertise, and assume responsibilities and co-ownership of center outputs. Our stakeholder engagement strategies are also guided by the conceptual framework shown on this slide. The framework includes key elements, such as the consideration of targeted needs of socially at-risk groups, motivations for community participation. And conditions and actions that influence the impact and reach of research interventions and health equity programs. As shown in column one of the table, there are a number of challenges to engaging stakeholder partners in health equity work. These challenges include the facilitation of two-way communication, cultivation of trust and transparency in partner relationships. Meaningful engagement in all phases of study implementation, building sustainable relationships, and dissemination of research findings. As shown in column two of the table, we have used several digital tools and social media platforms to help overcome these challenges. For instance, our center disseminates an electronic newsletter to facilitate two-way communication with our partners. We cultivate transparency through the use of online platforms, such as Adobe Connect, Periscope, and Facebook Live, for stakeholders who are unable to attend team meetings and seminars in person. We also use Twitter and Facebook to promote events from our community partners and to disseminate research findings to a broader audience. You will learn more about digital tools we use to disseminate findings later in this lecture. We also use digital tools in electronic platforms to engage our health system partners in health equity research. This slide shows pictures of the website for one of our research projects, Project RICH LIFE. You will hear more about this study and other lectures in the course. This web page includes training tools and study protocols for health system leaders participating in the study. It also includes a video from one of our physician leaders involved in the study. In a different research study at our center, called Project ReD CHiP, we used online videos with hypothetical patient case studies to train primary care physicians on approaches for communicating with their patients to identify barriers to achieving hypertension control. We also shared best practices for partnering with patients to overcome barriers to medication adherence. This slide shows example pictures of the hypothetical patients included in the training videos. This slide shows examples of additional communication training videos that we use to teach healthcare providers how to use open and non-judgmental questions to assess barriers to hypertension control. As well as how to partner with their patients to overcome these barriers. As I mentioned earlier in the lecture, we use electronic newsletter to facilitate regular two-way communication with all of our stakeholder partners. This slide shows an example of an article that we shared in our newsletter to announce the summer institute version of our Health Equity Research Methods course. By using MailChimp, we are able to create user-friendly newsletters that catch the reader's eye. MailChimp automatically collects data on open rates, click rates, subscribes, unsubscribes, and what time a user is viewing the newsletter, among other pieces of data. As you can see in the screenshot on this slide, on January 27th, our newsletter was opened 250 times. Our target audience is far-reaching. It includes community members who may want to stay involved outside of our in-person meetings, fellow researchers, faculty, staff, and students who are looking to get involved. We measure impact by looking at subscribe rates, verbal feedback, and ratings. Our center has a Facebook page, which allows us to engage patients, family members, and representatives of local community and national organizations, as well as faith-based organizations in our work. This platform allows us to share longer updates, live question and answer sessions, and videos of our public seminars. We assess the effectiveness of this communication approach by the number of likes, star ratings, and the total visits to the page. A screenshot of our Facebook page is shown on the slide. The Facebook platform is great when you are aiming to share stories about your organization, support narratives related to health equity research, respond to inaccuracies, or activate people who believe in your work. And also, to reach the next generation of health equity researchers. This slide shows example photos of stories that we shared to promote events and activities sponsored by our community partners. These activities included the Simple Cooking with Heart Kitchen in Baltimore, and a fundraiser hosted by one of our health system partners, the Park West Health System. We also have a Twitter page that allows us to engage researchers, academic centers, patient advocacy groups, professional societies, and research journals in our work. This platform is more appropriate for sharing shorter updates and links to research papers, patient education materials, and research videos. We assess the effectiveness of this communication approach by the number of followers and impact reports, which you will hear more about later in this lecture. A screenshot of our Twitter page is shown on the slide. The Twitter platform is great when you are aiming to increase engagement of the public, share scientific information and new ideas. Discuss or challenge emerging research, pursue professional opportunities, expand your health equity research networks, or provide support to mentees and colleagues. We use online videos and live streaming to help build trust and sustain relationships with our stakeholder partners who are unable to attend meetings and seminars in person. We also feature our stakeholder partners in several of these videos. This slide shows photos of prior Facebook Live videos and Twitter updates about our research trainings and team meetings. We also use Facebook Live videos and Periscope to share our health equity research jam session seminars with our stakeholder partners and the broader public. Examples of these videos are shown in the pictures on the slide. Live video streaming is a great tool for facilitating question and answer sessions, live chats with health equity experts, demonstrations of new programs, and real-time broadcasts of our events. YouTube is another useful platform that our center uses to engage stakeholders. The pictures on this slide show examples of videos that we have shared on our Johns Hopkins health equity YouTube playlist, including a TED Talk given by Dr. Lisa Cooper. And an educational video about hypertension disparities that we created for one of the local Baltimore churches. So these are just examples of how we have used digital tools and social media platforms to engage the broader public, to engage our center stakeholders, and to promote health equity to the broader public. [MUSIC]
