Most requests to do something about health misinformation land in a communications team. That is where the budget for it usually sits, and it is not where the answers are.
A health system meets people in far more places than a consulting room. Immunization sessions and screening invitations, antenatal and child health visits, outreach and community health workers, helplines, pharmacy counters, school and workplace programs, campaigns, and the accounts and pages the organization runs online are all points where it could learn what people are asking. Most of them are built to deliver something, and not to record what came back.
These nine questions are for your team, wherever in the system you sit. Whether you work in care delivery, health promotion, programs, communications or digital, a few of the answers will be yours and most will belong to colleagues elsewhere in the organization, which is why they are so rarely assembled in one place. Put them to the people who would know, together, and treat it as one conversation rather than a set of separate requests. The useful signal is whether anyone can answer at all.
One reason this sits with system leadership and not only with communications: in a KFF tracking poll of 2,480 US adults in May 2026, 39% of people without a trusted health care provider said the claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism was probably or definitely true, against 24% of those who had one. Weekly users of social media for health information were at 37%, against 16% of people who do not use it that way. The differences held after controlling for age, race and ethnicity, education, partisanship and insurance status. A trusted provider is one touchpoint among many, and it is measurably doing information work. The same question is worth asking of every other place the system meets people.
1. Who knows what people have already read, seen and been told before they reach us?
People arrive at any part of the system having searched, compared and discussed. Almost no organization has made this anyone’s job. Search monitoring and social listening, where they exist, usually sit in communications and report on public conversation rather than on what arrives at the door.
A good answer names where this is captured, even informally, and how it reaches the people who write guidance and design programs.
2. Which of our touchpoints could tell us what people are asking, and which of them do?
Every place the system meets people is a place it could learn something. Most are set up to deliver a service, a message or a product, with no route back.
A good answer is a list of touchpoints with a mark against the ones where what people said is written down and reaches someone who can act on it.
3. When our own guidance is uncertain, where does it say so?
Uncertainty tends to be removed somewhere between the evidence review and the public-facing page. What survives is a recommendation with the reasoning stripped out.
A good answer points at a published page that states what is unsettled, and names who decided that wording.
4. How much time is protected for listening, and in which services?
This is a scheduling and staffing decision, made a long way from any communications plan, and it applies as much to an outreach visit or a helpline shift as to a consultation.
A good answer is a number, service by service, and the name of the person accountable for it.
5. What happens to a question the front line cannot answer?
Complaints have a route through the organization. Questions usually do not. A question that recurs across a hundred encounters, whether in a clinic, a community session or an inbox, is information about a gap in guidance or in services, and it typically stops with the person who was asked.
A good answer describes the path from a recurring question to a change in guidance or in how a program is run, and gives an example from the past year.
6. What do we publish that is out of date, and who checks?
Health systems produce the information environment as well as react to it. Superseded advice, dead pages, and leaflets that outlived their evidence all sit under the organization’s own name.
A good answer is a review cycle, a named person accountable for it, and a date for the last sweep.
7. Where do we appear when someone looks up the health topics we work on?
Cheap to check and rarely checked. For many topics the first page of results belongs to commercial services, and the organization responsible for that area of health is not on it.
A good answer is that someone has looked, recently, across the topics people most often come to the organization about, prevention included.
8. Who is answerable when something we said turns out to be wrong?
Correcting your own error is a different process from correcting someone else’s, and it is the one that builds standing. Most organizations have a route for the second and not the first.
A good answer is a named route that has been used at least once.
9. Where has the organization decided to take part online, and who is supported to do it?
Being present where people ask questions costs staff time and carries personal risk for the people who do it. That makes it a decision for leadership rather than something left to whoever volunteers.
A good answer is a decision on record about which spaces the organization is present in, and which colleagues are trained and backed to work in them.
What the answers tell you
If most of these get a clear answer, the work is already happening under other names, and the task is to connect it. If most of them do not, that is the finding, and what it identifies is a gap in accountability.
None of these questions asks whether misinformation is a problem. They ask what the organization knows, what it hears across all the places it meets people, and where it shows up. That is a different diagnosis, and it points at different people.
Related: the information environment, and where infodemic management fits. If you want to talk about applying this where you work, get in touch.