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 impact Latino and all people, as well as promote solutions and build people’s capacity to change these issues.

“We want to help people understand 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 health topics. In their searches, they use a variety of criteria: topic, the types of content we promote, the geographic areas, relevance to our audience, and emerging healthy changes and solutions that are working.

Craft. Curators extract the most relevant points from the original content to write posts about health news, resources, policy/system changes, and/or peer models of policy and system changes. Curators cite relevant scientific evidence, and emphasize the impact on Latinos and all people 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 visuals; our peer modeled stories often also include videos with interviews of the role models or change-makers. Then we bring the website content to our audiences across our different channels, including social media, email communication, partners and scientific groups, podcast, Facebook Groups, and more.

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

Meet our digital content curators

Alyssa Gonzales, BA
Digital Content Curator & Communication Specialist, Salud America!

Alyssa Gonzales is a digital content curator for Salud America! and its home base, the Institute for Health Promotion Research at UT Health San Antonio. Alyssa is a proud graduate of West Texas A&M University’s media communication department and has a passion for telling the stories of others, informing the public effectively and accurately, and bringing awareness to issues that are important and impactful to the community.

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Catherine Wilson
Digital Content Curator & Communication Specialist, Salud America!

Catherine Wilson is 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 graduate of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland College Park, and hopes to utilize her skills to help people find their voices and inspire change in their communities.

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Amanda Merck
Digital Content Curator & Senior Research Area Specialist, Salud America!

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, transportation, and health for children in and after school. She enjoys watching The Office and Parks & Rec. Read about her health work!

Read Amanda’s Articles