Community Health and Digital Communications

Health equity within and across communities is shaped by numerous social factors. These social determinants of health are often echoed on and impacted by digital platforms. Effective public health responses must, therefore, consider a community’s digital ecosystem while developing equity-oriented sociotechnical systems and approaches. In this work, we have partnered with several community-based research coalitions to address issues of health equity that especially affect Black and Hispanic/Latinx communities in Georgia.

Our partners include Morehouse School of Medicine and Emory University, working with community-based organizations and local health departments. Activities within this project have investigated how social media monitoring can support community-based trusted messengers to understand and address culturally targeted health misinformation. We have developed new systems for researchers to send highly targeted adaptive health messages via mobile phones. We are also engaging community health workers around their uses of and aspirations for social media and artificial intelligence as health communication and advocacy tools.