The fourth annual “Day of Innovation and Insights” and “Bettinghaus Endowed Lecture,” hosted by the Department of Communication and the Health and Risk Communication Center at Michigan State University, offered new approaches to health communication for master’s students and practicing professionals alike. The event featured an engaging panel and a keynote lecture, highlighting what three alumni of the Master of Arts in Health and Risk Communication program have learned from the communities they serve today — and how we can equip graduates to make meaningful impacts in the field tomorrow.

Innovation and Insights

The day began with the Innovations and Insights Panel, featuring HRCMA alumni Susanna Joy (’14) and Theresa Petee (’19), alongside AD+PR Assistant Professor Maria D. Molina. The panelists shared practical strategies and lessons from their careers, focusing on the importance of truly engaging with communities and adapting to challenges in public health communication.

Theresa Petee, now the director of outreach for Living Beyond Breast Cancer, emphasized how community-informed strategies can drive impactful outreach. She described her work tailoring messaging and incentives to meet the unique needs of breast cancer survivors, ensuring efficacy and trust within the communities she serves through intentional inclusion.

“We invited a lived experience expert, someone with breast cancer, to participate in our strategic planning process,” Petee said. “Bringing in that lived experience — through our recruitment process, survey administration and through identifying incentives — we were able to really wrap our arms around the community in a way that we would have not been able to had we not looped them into the process.”

Susanna Joy, now a senior project coordinator at the National Center for Fatality Review and Prevention, shared her experience addressing disparities in maternal and child health. She underscored the importance of listening and understanding cultural contexts, especially when members of a community are experiencing a tragedy and the work is so important.

“We need to get into communities, and know them, and listen to them, in order to do our work well,” Joy said. “Knowing the people that you’re trying to help and letting their needs and leadership take you to solutions, instead of coming down with solutions to them. When I came into this program, that’s kind of what I thought. I was like, ‘I’m going to figure this out and I’m going to help people.’ Instead of, ‘People need things, but they can tell me what they need, and we can come up with solutions together. I can follow the leadership of a community,’” she said. “I think that was a resounding consensus.”

Molina’s discussion topic added another forward-looking perspective: the prospect of artificial intelligence (AI) in health communication. “Generative AI (GenAI) technologies, like ChatGPT or Gemini, can help us achieve hyper personalization, where we create unique messages for each individual at scale,” Molina said. “This is great from a health perspective because we can tailor messages to each individual’s needs and culture. This idea already existed pre-generative AI, but it was not feasible because it would have required the health communicator to create all of these individual messages by themselves. But, with GenAI, this is now actually possible. Yet, there are several challenges that need to be addressed, like for example how to protect user data.”

The panel agreed this is an area both ripe for innovation and fraught with potential challenges.

“One of the places that I know ‘the system’ is taxed and under resourced in many ways is in mental health provision,” Joy said. “We’re in a staffing crisis in a number of vital provider spaces. I think we at least need to explore, and either eliminate the possibility or have some answers around what [AI agents] could do. What gaps could it fill? There’s some that it can’t, but how could we leverage the technologies to improve outcomes across the population?”

For Petee, the ethical considerations in this space are key. “What are the limitations? Where will we stop?” she asked. “What [Molina] was presenting on, in her research, was that once information is shared — whether it’s embodied or disembodied, whether it’s a chat bot — there’s a lot of disclosure. We explored some of the challenges of what that could look like, because you can’t take that information back once it is already out there.”

The Bettinghaus Endowed Lecture

Closing the event was alumnus Evan Perrault (M.A. ’11, Ph.D. ’14), now an associate professor of health communication at Purdue University’s Brian Lamb School of Communication. As this year’s Bettinghaus Endowed Lecture speaker, Perrault shared his journey from a career in TV news to academia — fueled by a desire to create better messaging and humanize health care interactions.

In fact, Perrault’s experience in television provided key inspiration for his studies. “I would go places like the grocery store, and people from the community would come up to me and talk to me like they knew me forever and tell me their stories,” Perrault recalled. “It was kind of an interesting phenomenon, but then that got me thinking ... Well, they saw me on TV in short snippets of video every night, and because of that they kind of think they know me as a real person — and not a stranger — whom they’re willing to share sometimes deeply personal information. When I came here to MSU to study, I wanted to continue that line of inquiry.”

Drawing from more personal experiences, including a traumatic car accident and subsequent encounters with the health care system, Perrault developed a passion for making people feel more informed while selecting new health care providers. He wants to help patients select clinicians with whom they can feel a better level of fit, and more comfortable communicating with in their initial interactions.

“I spent 10 days in the hospital after my accident; most of the left side of my body was broken,” Perrault said. “So, finding doctors I could connect with to help me with my recovery and future care became a real big part of my life.”

These days, his research explores small but impactful changes to improve patient comfort and decision-making. One tactic Perrault champions is enhancing providers’ online biographies with personal and relatable details... and of course, video.

In one of his studies, Perrault looked at how long a provider video truly needs to be for a patient viewing it to feel they can make an informed decision about whether they want to visit the provider. “And really, the sweet spot — I call it the ‘Goldilocks zone’ — was around 45 seconds, and that’s really only the answer to one or two questions,” he explained. “What that means is, health care systems don’t necessarily need to hire professional video firms to shoot and edit extremely long and highly produced videos to help their patient populations make these important decisions."

He notes that patients want a personal connection, but a lengthy video may not hold their attention. Additionally, the details within longer videos can have a greater likelihood of getting out-of-date much more quickly. Therefore, Perrault advocates for additional text-based details to be added online; information that can more easily be updated by healthcare systems. “I found that when we have short videos, but you supplement them with more descriptive text, that works just as well as having a much longer video,” he said.

Perrault also highlighted a series of innovative health communication campaigns and interventions he’s designed where messages are integrated in everyday settings, such as placing health messaging on napkins in dining halls and restaurants, or stickers with QR codes on diaper wipe packages to promote infant safe sleep. By thinking creatively about message placement, these messaging attempts can achieve impressive (and measurable) reach and engagement — demonstrating how minor changes in approach can yield significant public health benefits.

“The fun stuff, for me, is working with communities; getting out into communities and doing real health communication for groups,” Perrault said.

The Takeaway: Connection is Key to Greater Impact

Understanding that persuasion is an easier task to achieve when the recipient has buy-in, both the panel and the lecture stressed the vital role of community-centered approaches to health communication. Whether inviting communities to co-design solutions — or simply meeting them where they are — humility, empathy, and a deep understanding of their experiences are essential tools for success.

Removing barriers to access information also plays a role in connecting people with the resources they need.

“We see where those gaps are, perhaps in ways that we didn’t when we were on [the academia] side of it,” Joy said. “I’m a huge fan of Open Access publishing. Like, if you don’t have Open Access publishing, your research is never going to get into the hands of the people that are serving human beings on the front lines in public health. They will want to know best practice, but they won’t get to know it.”

Joy also advocates for providing practical, actionable solutions within that research. “We need to be able to speak the language of the academy, but we need to make really concrete recommendations about application so that you don't have to have a graduate degree to interpret what you’re reading — if you can even access it,” she added.

Perrault agrees. “That’s what I really like, too — the stuff I'm doing doesn’t just kind of live on a dusty bookshelf, or behind a pay wall. I can take what I’m doing and implement it into practice,” he said. “The nice thing that I really loved here at Michigan State, when I was in the program, is they had that focus on applied knowledge. Don’t just do research for research’s sake, but make sure we can actually implement it in the real world.” 

For the HRCMA students and newer professionals in attendance, the event offered valuable insights and encouragement. Providing examples of their own career trajectories, the speakers advised embracing flexibility and resilience in career paths.

“After the talk, I sat down with the HRCMA students and they said, ‘It’s so nice hearing that there can be different paths to get to where you want to be.’ That’s what I was hoping to share with them today,” said Petee. “Your first job out of grad school might not be your dream job, but there’s hope. You’re making connections and talking to people and finding your people in the professional space. You can build and get to where you want to be at the later stages in your career.”

This story originally appeared on the ComArtSci website.