Mobile Apps at CDC: Taking Educational Health Information and Putting It in the Context of a Mobile App

Background: CDC is committed to providing new ways to interact with CDC through technology.  Part of CDC’s mission is to educate and inform the public about health issues, to protect them and provide tools so they can keep healthy and safe. Mobile apps are a fun way to do that, taking educational health information and putting it in the context of an app. With mobile device ownership growing exponentially and average smartphone users checking their device 150 times a day, it’s our hope that this increases overall health knowledge and will be more effective than, say, a brochure or banner ad about how to avoid norovirus.

Program background: Since 2011, CDC has released a number of mobile apps some of which are topic based (CDC’s mobile framework apps) while others focus on an important aspect of CDC’s work to educate the public (Solve the Outbreak) or an app that displays CDC’s most up to date public health information and news (CDC’s mobile tablet app). Solve the Outbreak is the first mobile CDC app to use all-new content that was created specifically for the app. Prior to Solve the Outbreak CDC used existing technology – content syndication to easily update and adapt content with minimal overhead, at half the development time. This part of the panel will review the different mobile apps CDC has been working on, to improve knowledge about real-life public health issues and reach people via new technology to showcase the important work of CDC. 

Evaluation Methods and Results: To date CDC has 9 mobile apps, totaling 164,793 app downloads and 6,984,196 page views.  During the past 3 years, CDC has conducted usability studies and surveys to evaluate the success of our mobile apps. We also review the mobile app metrics and data collected through the app stores – Apple iTunes, Google Play and Windows. In addition, to app reviews conducted by independent organizations regarding the success of the apps.  This section of the panel will highlight some of the methods and results of this evaluation.

Conclusions: Mobile apps allow us to share and disseminate credible, educational, science-based information via new technology. Mobile devices are at the center of consumers lives, potentially the remote control to our lives, online is no longer time spent in front of a PC it is an anywhere state and CDC is engaging people where they already go for information to positively impact the health of our nation.

Implications for research and/or practice: Learning about health can be fun and entertaining. The goal of the mobile applications development team was to try to develop a way to communicate important health messages in a fun and interactive way.  In developing each of these mobile apps we have acquired knowledge and lessons learned in a number of areas, which we will share today.