The Science of Digital Content Curation at Salud America!

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The Internet is crazy huge.

So, how can health communicators reach the right people with the right health messages?

At Salud America!, we use “digital content curation” to raise awareness of the particular health issues that disproportionately burden Latino children and families, as well as promote solutions and build people’s capacity to change these issues.

“We want to help people understand Latino health issues and solutions, and inspire people to drive healthy community change for Latino and all families,” said Dr. Amelie G. Ramirez, director of Salud America!, based at the Institute for Health Promotion Research at UT Health San Antonio.

Check out our new scientific article that explains how we “curate.”

Our approach to digital content curation

Digital content curation is an emerging strategy that uses a systematic, refined process to create tailored online and social health messages and prevent mixed messaging and information overload for an audience.

With massive amounts of content created across the Internet every minute, our Salud America! digital content curation model creates research-driven, theory-based, culturally relevant, and engaging peer model content that inspires people to drive community change.

We use a three-step approach—collect, craft, and connect.

Collect. Our digital content curators daily sort through vast amounts of content on the web about Latino health topics. In their searches, they use a variety of criteria: their Latino health equity research topic, the types of content we promote, the geographic areas where there are a majority or growing population of Latinos, the relevance to Latinos, and whether there is a Latino behind emerging changes and solutions.

Craft. Curators extract the most relevant points from the original content to write posts about Latino health equity resources, policy/system changes, and/or Latino peer models of policy and system changes. Curators use cultural cues, cite relevant scientific evidence, and emphasize the impact on Latinos within each post’s title and body content. Each post explores emerging solutions and includes cues to take action for grassroots change. Also, each post is reviewed for its readability and search engine optimization.

Connect. We publish digitally curated content on our website. Each curated post also features Latino-focused visuals; our peer modeled stories often also include videos with interviews of the Latino policy/system change-makers. Then we bring the website content to our Latino audiences across our different channels, including social media, email communication, partners and scientific groups, and Facebook Groups.

“We work hard to highlight the latest real-life stories, research, and news on different aspects of health equity,” Ramirez said.

Meet our digital content curators

Amanda Merck
Amanda Merck has served since 2015 as a digital content curator for Salud America! and its home base, the Institute for Health Promotion Research at UT Health San Antonio. She is a UTHealth School of Public Health grad who is passionate about physical activity and health equity for children in and after school. She enjoys watching The Office and Parks & Rec.

Read Amanda’s Articles

Josh McCormack, BA
Digital Content Curator, Salud America!
Josh McCormack joined Salud America! and its home base, the Institute for Health Promotion Research at UT Health San Antonio, in February 2019. Graduating from Texas A&M University with a BA in English Literature, he has previously worked in journalism and publishing. Josh enjoys reading; some of his favorite authors include Stephen King, Omar El Akkad and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Read Josh’s Articles

Pramod Sukumaran
Pramod Sukumaran completed his PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology and an MPH in Population Health Analytics. He curates content for Salud America! on family support and health projects at the Institute for Health Promotion Research (IHPR) at UT Health San Antonio. His emphasis is on the latest research, reports and resources related to various disease and policies to improve Latino health.