The Healthy People 2020 Leading Health Indicators: Lessons Learned In Streamlining Outreach to Improve Dissemination, Use of Resources, and Impact of a Multi-Pronged Public Health Campaign

Background:  In October 2011, the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP) launched the Healthy People 2020 Leading Health Indicators (LHIs). The LHI’s are a smaller set of Healthy People 2020 objectives that have been selected to communicate high-priority health issues and actions that can be taken to address them.

Program background:  The release of the LHIs coincided with the launch of a multi-pronged e-campaign that serves as a point of alignment for most Healthy People 2020 outreach activities. Consisting of 26 indicators organized under 12 topic areas, the Who’s Leading the Leading Health Indicators? series highlights one topic area each month in 2012.  The series consists of a monthly bulletin and webinar that provide an overview of the LHI topic, recent data and trends, and showcase states, communities, or organizations addressing a leading health indicator in innovative ways. In order to improve dissemination, use of resources, and overall impact of the LHI series ODPHP streamlined Healthy People outreach around the LHIs. This included merging the various bulletins, newsletters, and listservs into a single listserv that receives the LHI bulletin and ad hoc announcements. ODPHP also reorganized Healthy People social media including LinkedIn and Twitter to focus on the monthly topic area and related data, resources, and events. Social media tools help enhance the interactivity of the LHI webinars. This includes live tweeting of facts and data during the webinars and follow-up questions from the webinar posted to LinkedIn. In each forum, ODPHP and stakeholders are able to continue and build upon the conversation. The reorganization of social media included daily themes and a drive to create accountability for tweeting various types of information (action-based resources, health news, events and activities, LHI data, etc.). Categories of conversations were developed to explore the most effective ways to Tweet about Healthy People. By sorting tweets into categories, ODPHP is learning how to be more responsive by monitoring which category receives the most clicks, retweets, faves, and so on. ODPHP has made strides in building partnerships to co-promote the LHIs. Each month, partners at the national, state, and local levels are provided promotional language and tweets that they can easily share with their constituents. In addition, ODPHP reaches out to bloggers in a respective topic area to co-promote the webinar and bulletin.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  ODPHP develops a targeted communication plan focused on each month’s LHI topic, and implements this on a national level, in addition to meeting with a communication representative from that month’s featured organization to ensure targeted local outreach. Each month, ODPHP has continued to improve the reach and engagement of the LHI series by learning from what has or has not worked.

Conclusions:  The implementation of the LHI series and supporting outreach is multi-faceted and continues to grow. ODPHP feels it is important to share lessons learned with offices interested in promoting their own initiatives.

Implications for research and/or practice:  ODPHP's lessons learned can help improve practice by offering strategies to improve dissemination, use of resources, and impact via a streamlined approach.