Public Health Innovations Catalog

Informatics touches nearly every subfield of public health, but the discipline is often invisible to public health professionals—even though their work benefits from the innovations in data collection and information sharing that informatics brings to the field. Because informatics is not well known by professionals who are not experts in the field, it can be difficult to communicate about what informaticians do and how their work supports public health. It also makes it challenging to recruit and develop a public health workforce that fully incorporates informatics expertise. The purpose of this toolkit, therefore, is to facilitate more productive communication about public health informatics.

The FrameWorks Institute conducted this work on behalf of the Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII), a program of the Task Force for Global Health, with support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). FrameWorks also wishes to thank the Georgia Department of Public Health and the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) for their contributions to this project.

This toolkit includes:

• “Big picture” guidance on how to talk more effectively about public health informatics, including a Quickstart guide that reviews the topline recommendations, “reframed answers” to a set of FAQs, and sample talking points, examples, and elevator speeches.
• “Reframe cards” that can be used as quick reference guides for incorporating the evidence-based values and metaphors into conversations, presentations, and writing.
• Sample communications, including sample PowerPoint slides, a sample grant application narrative, and animated metaphor GIFs that can be used in presentations or incorporated into web content. The grant application includes detailed notes that unpack the framing strategies illustrated, so that the recommendations can be extended to myriad new applications.