Picture Public Health: Reimagining What Health Looks like

Background: From health literacy research, we know that including imagery to support written content can help people with limited literacy skills find, understand, and use health information. We also know that most people prefer photographs of “real” people rather than illustrations or people who look like models. Health communicators often use stock photography when developing materials like digital tools or public health campaigns. But many times, it’s difficult and time-consuming to find appropriate images — or worse, high-quality, medically accurate photos just don’t exist.

Program background: To meet this growing need, CommunicateHealth, Inc. launched Picture Public Health (PPH). PPH is a stock photo website that’s curated specifically for public health professionals. The photos on PPH:

• Are realistic and honest, showing regular people doing healthy things
• Reflect cultural and ethnic diversity — and a range of sizes, ages, incomes, and locations
• Model healthy behaviors, like people wearing helmets while riding bikes
• Emphasize medical accuracy, like a realistically sized vaccine
• Are affordable even for organizations on a budget
• Are searchable by health topic, to make it easier for you to find the perfect image for your material

PPH offers images of real people, in diverse communities, making healthy decisions, and all of our images are reviewed by public health experts to make sure they’re in line with best practices. The audience for PPH is anyone who needs health-related imagery for their projects: health communicators, clinicians, hospital administrators, non-profit administrators, private sector professionals, and educators.

Evaluation Methods and Results: CommunicateHealth has been gathering stock photography preferences, pain points, and use cases for over 5 years — from our work as a health communication consulting company, and from our clients’ experiences too. We’ve built in features such as a robust search, actionable captions, and a “you may also be interested in” to address user pain points. Picture Public Health is launching in May, 2017. After we launch, we’ll collect information on how many photos are downloaded, how they’re used, and health professionals’ satisfaction with the service. This information will be used to refine and further develop PPH’s image library to meet our audience’s communication needs.

Conclusions: PPH provides the public health workforce with easy access to accurate, authentic, engaging, and affordable images to complement important health messages. PPH photos help to create public health products that don’t just inform, but inspire.

Implications for research and/or practice: PPH is a new idea to ensure that public health professionals have easy access to accurate, authentic, and engaging photographs to use in health education materials and health promotion campaigns. Using relatable, high-quality images will help limited literacy audiences find, understand, and use health information. This will also help public health agencies build trust with diverse target audiences. Our goal is to change how health messages are represented using photos, and set new standards for images used in public health campaigns.