Health and wellbeing are determined by a number of complex, interrelated factors. The application of design thinking to questions around health may prove valuable and complement existing approaches. A number of public health projects utilizing human centered design (HCD), or design thinking, have recently emerged, but no synthesis of the literature around these exists. The results of a scoping review of current research on human centered design for health outcomes are presented. The review aimed to understand why and how HCD can be valuable in the contexts of health related research. Results identified pertinent literature as well as gaps in information on the use of HCD for public health research, design, implementation and evaluation. A variety of contexts were identified in which design has been used for health. Global health and design thinking have different underlying conceptual models and terminology, creating some inherent tensions, which could be overcome through clear communication and documentation in collaborative projects. The review concludes with lessons learned from the review on how future projects can better integrate design thinking with global health research.

The Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) Anti-Infodemic Virtual Center for the Americas (AIVCA) is a project led by the Department of Evidence and Intelligence for Action in Health, PAHO and the Center for Health Informatics, PAHO/WHO Collaborating Center on Information Systems for Health, at the University of Illinois, with the participation of PAHO staff and consultants across the region. Its goal is to develop a set of tools—pairing AI with human judgment—to help ministries of health and related health institutions respond to infodemics. Public health officials will learn about emerging threats detected by the center and get recommendations on how to respond. The virtual center is structured with three parallel teams: detection, evidence, and response. The detection team will employ a mixture of advanced search queries, machine learning, and other AI techniques to sift through more than 800 million new public social media posts per day to identify emerging infodemic threats in both English and Spanish. The evidence team will use the EasySearch federated search engine backed by AI, PAHO’s knowledge management team, and the Librarian Reserve Corps to identify the most relevant authoritative sources. The response team will use a design approach to communicate recommended response strategies based on behavioural science, storytelling, and information design approaches.

Patterns of Internet access and use among disadvantaged subgroups of Americans reveal that not all disparities are the same, a distinction crucial for appropriate public policies and health promotion program planning. In their book, Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society, and Participation, authors Karen Mossberger, Caroline Tolbert, and Ramona McNeal deconstructed national opinion surveys and used multivariate methods of data analysis to demonstrate the impact of exclusion from online society economically, socially, and politically among disadvantaged Americans.

In 2012, the Association of Schools and Programs in Public Health (ASPPH) in the United States launched a 3-year initiative to rethink education in public health, in anticipation of the 100-year anniversary of the Welch-Rose Report (Welsh & Rose, 1915). Since this first blueprint for schools of public health was published, the landscapes of health care, public health, education, and other major public service areas have changed dramatically. The Society for Public Health Education, Inc. (SOPHE) was one of some 20 organizations invited to join The Framing the Future: The Second 100 Years of Public Health Task Force, which was organized into six expert panels and one advisory board (ASPPH, 2014). The Expert Panel on Community Colleges was of special interest to SOPHE, given that many SOPHE members work in 4-year colleges and universities that have existing course requirements and/or degree program articulations with community colleges or have expressed interest in strengthening connections between junior colleges and universities in the United States. Community colleges educate nearly half of all undergraduate students, including a substantial proportion of future health professionals; have strong connections to the communities they serve, a foundational element shared with health education; and enroll many students from underserved communities who could enhance the diversity of the 628881P HPXXX10.

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