Educating people about important health-related topics is core to the work we do as a health care PR firm. At The Reis Group, we are passionate about working on meaningful issues and we believe the work we’re doing is making the world a better, healthier place. Our clients are addressing some of the most pressing health issues today, including obesity, vaccination, Alzheimer’s disease, digestive diseases and more. Every day, we have the privilege of working collaboratively with dedicated clients to promote healthy behaviors and drive behavioral change.
According to the World Health Organization, health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over their health and then make changes to improve it. This is accomplished by building healthy public policies, creating supportive environments, and strengthening community action and personal skills.
The concept of promoting healthy behaviors seems simple: Provide knowledge about the topic and how it impacts health. Offer factual, science-based information on how to address the issue. The result: change behavior and spark action.
But it’s not always that simple. For better—and for worse—there seems to be an infinite number of places where people can get health information. Millions are turning to social media for health-related information, with increasingly powerful “influencers” playing a large role in shaping their behaviors. More than 50% of Gen Zers, for example, are choosing TikTok for health and wellness advice, according to a new survey, with 1 in 3 citing TikTok as their main source of health information.
But we know that the information found on various social media platforms is not always accurate and often cannot be trusted. To address this, we worked with a client to develop and execute a disease-specific education program aimed at social media influencers. We taught patient influencers who suffer from inflammatory bowel disease how to interpret the science and the practice of gastroenterology so they could share accurate and useful IBD-related news and science with their followers. We recruited, vetted and selected a group of influencers — representing diversity across gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation — to participate in the program to ensure they represented a range of lived experiences. The influencers who participated later said they felt more confident, engaged and informed to communicate information about the disease with their followers. High engagement on this content highlighted the public’s desire for this kind of more reliable information source.
Social media has certainly increased access to health information but has also contributed to the spread of misinformation at increasing speed and scale. This became alarmingly evident during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Misinformation and disinformation were rampant, contributing to confusion and hesitancy about vaccination. To combat this, TRG tapped into local trusted messengers across the country, including infectious disease experts, health-system pharmacists and pediatricians to build trust with the public and share timely, accurate information about COVID-19 and vaccines. Our efforts helped people make informed decisions about vaccination and contributed to more than 230 million Americans rolling up their sleeves.
This is what makes our jobs as health care public relations professionals so important. Through the public health education campaigns we spearhead, we are helping to promote healthy behaviors by offering credible information to support people in making educated decisions about their health and well-being, with the ultimate goal of improving health for all Americans.
