CDC Blog - Health Marketing Musings

Blogs have certainly come of age. Recently, the Director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) started one of his own - Health Marketing Musings.

What is health marketing? According to the CDC,

Health Marketing involves creating, communicating, and delivering health information and interventions using customer-centered and science-based strategies to protect and promote the health of diverse populations (CDC, 2005).

Health Marketing is:

• A multidisciplinary practice that promotes the use of marketing research to educate, motivate and inform the public on health messages
• An integration of the traditional marketing field with public health research, theory and practice
• A complex framework that provides guidance for designing health interventions, campaigns, communications, and research projects
• A broad range of strategies and techniques that can be used to create synergy among public health research, communication messages and health behaviors.

Latest postings - Health Marketing Musings (RSS feed)

• Social Networks that Care about Health
  Wikipedia describes a social network as “a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission, or airline routes. The resulting structures are often very complex.”
• Take the Test. Blog the Day.
  To help prepare for National HIV Testing Day (June 27, 2008), AIDS.gov is sponsoring a Webinar for Bloggers (sometimes called a ‘blogginar’) on Tuesday, June 17th at 2:00pm eastern time. Beginning with a similar webinar last year, AIDS.gov has been communicating directly with bloggers so they can help encourage their readers to get tested. Since one in four Americans living with HIV is unaware of having it, this effort is a crucial piece of protecting and improving the health of people in the US. It also is an excellent example how Web 2.0 strategies can be used to impact health.
• China – The New Health Marketing Frontier
  I’ve asked Melinda Frost, former lead for NCHM’s Global Communication and Marketing team, to write a guest blog for this month’s edition of Health Marketing Musings. Since early November, Melinda has served in a unique capacity for our Center. She works under the US Embassy in Beijing, China as the first US CDC health communications officer placed overseas. One of her roles is to determine how US CDC can best partner with China’s Ministry of Health to increase their ability to deliver tailored, culturally appropriate health information to affected populations at national and sub-national levels. – Jay Bernhardt
• Going Mobile for Public Health
  The most important platform in the world for collecting and delivering targeted and tailored health information during the first half of the 21st Century will be mobile phones. Mobile phones and integrated wireless devices will revolutionize the practice of public health and touch billions of lives around the world.
• Can you obtain, process, and understand this blog?
  Health Literacy is the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions, as defined by the National Library of Medicine and as used in Healthy People 2010. According to the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), more than 77 million adults in the US demonstrate basic or below basic health literacy skills.