I’m sharing the notes behind the very busy slide I used today at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC)‘s webinar on the information environment in health.
I was invited by John Kinsman and Susana Barragán to speak more broadly about the information environment in health, alongside Neville Calleja, who spoke from public health practice in Malta, and Catherine BERTRAND-FERRANDIS Bertrand Ferrandis, who spoke about the information environment analysis developed for the white paper on women’s health by the French Women’s Health Collaborative.
The notes are long because the subject is large, and because apparently, when you get 8 minutes to explain a complex system, your compensation mechanism is to write far too many notes afterwards.
Not everyone will want to read the whole thing, which is fair. Feel free to peruse your favorite LLM to turn it into a summary, podcast, or chat. And yes, there is some irony in writing about AI changing the information environment in health and then recommending that approach, but here we are.
My core point is simple: the information environment in health is systemic, multi-actor, meaning-shaping, and dynamic (hat tip for the definition to The Royal Society and Luciano Floridi).
We need to understand the environment people are actually living in, because it is already shaping health whether we are ready for it or not.