January 23, 2025
The Commission on Quality Health Information for All seeks to counter worldwide decline in trustworthy health content
22 January 2025 — Nature Medicine today announced in a Comment piece the formation of a new Commission on Quality Health Information for All. Over the next two years, this Commission will conduct an analysis and recommend concrete actions to promote broader access to high quality health information, advance health literacy and affirm the importance of effective health communication in the digital era.
“The public need access to quality health information so that they can live healthy lives, but such information isn’t always accessible or easily understandable,” says Dr. Benjamin Johnson, senior editor of Nature Medicine. “We know that scientists, doctors and other health professionals need better training in the practice of health communication, so that health advice is shared in a way that the public understands and trusts. That is why Nature Medicine decided to help convene a global team of experts in health communications, public health and social science to develop a series of practical solutions to improve the availability and impact of quality health information.”
The new Commission will be based at the O’Neill Institute for National and International Health Law, which is housed at Georgetown University Law Center, in Washington, D.C. Professor Lawrence O. Gostin, who is the founding O’Neill Chair in Global Health Law and the director of the WHO Center on Global Health Law, is a co-chair of the new group. He explains that “health information is today considered to be one of the major determinants of health. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the public has been inundated with a dizzying array of false and misleading health information. As a result, public trust in health agencies has plummeted, confidence in lifesaving tools like vaccines is eroding and people lack the basic factual information needed to make decisions about their health and safety.”
Available data from U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory, “Confronting Health Misinformation” (2021), highlights that poor quality health information can cause confusion and risk-taking behaviors, trigger mistrust in health authorities and undermine public health responses. “This problem goes well beyond infectious diseases, impacting chronic illnesses and factors vital to human health and wellbeing, such as nutrition, physical activity, injury prevention, and mental health” added Gostin.
Scott C. Ratzan, MD, who leads a master’s program on Health Communication for Social Change at the City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy and is founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Health Communication, will co-chair the new Commission. “One of our first aims,” he says, “is to advance the importance of the science and practice of quality health communication as a distinctive public health field.”
According to Commission co-chair, Professor Heidi J. Larson, Chair of the Global Listening Project and Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project, “The Commission aims to be inclusive, engaging the opinions, experiences, and participation of experts from all continents and cultures, including those who work at global, regional, national, community, and grass-roots levels.”
Commission co-chair, Dr. Carolina Batista, Head of Global Health for Baraka Impact Finance and a previous board member of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), adds that, “We will also place an emphasis on the current and projected role of advanced communication technologies, such as AI. Digital technology has the potential to broaden the public dialogue on health and engage people to consider emerging alternatives across languages and cultures.”
The Commission’s work will be driven by specialized working groups led by its four co-chairs. Each group will be authorized to develop discussion papers, conduct quantitative and qualitative audience research, hold public hearings, and propose specific communications models to improve health information quality and uptake, and to publish interim findings, when appropriate. Topics will include:
- Understanding the cultural context for interpreting scientific facts and evidence
- Understanding the roles of traditional media, digital and social media in a changing health communication environment
- Ensuring the conditions for quality health information, consistent with the freedom of expression and human rights
- Leveraging generative and multi-modal AI for promoting quality information and building trust
- Developing Health Information Quality indicators to measure, assess and potentially certify content.
Other international organizations with an interest in health communication, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Global Listening Project, the U.S. Council for International Business Foundation, the Council for Quality Health Communication, the Health Equity Community Collaborative (HECC) and other partners in the technology and media sectors will support on implementing the Commission’s research and development agenda.
The Commission envisions completing its work and publishing a final set of quality health information action recommendations to health communications policy makers and practitioners in 2027.
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