Harnessing Digital Media to Promote Health and Research

In 2009, the American Heart Association created the 2020 Impact Goals, aspiring to improve cardiovascular health for Americans by 20% while reducing death from cardiovascular disease and stroke by 20%.1 These goals hinge on changing health behaviors (eg, diet, exercise, smoking) and health factors (eg, blood pressure, blood glucose) that are themselves dependent on behaviors. In the intervening years since 2009, there have been drastic changes in the way we obtain information, communicate, and consume goods. In 2009, the iPhone was 2 years old, and the Apple app store had just been launched. Twitter and Facebook were about to take off and since then have seen a >1000% increase in users. Meanwhile, the sharing economy was born, with the founding of Uber in 2009. As we near 2020 and the next set of American Heart Association Impact Goals, it is an opportune time to examine how digital media enabled trends (Figure) from the past decade may influence research and policy approaches. Figure. Three digital media-enabled trends that influence health and research. One notable trend is the surge in social media use over the past decade. Public sharing of information over social media has created a vast wealth of data that can be accessed for health-related data mining and predictive analytics. Social media users are surprisingly diverse—≈70% of US adults use social media. Although social media users skew younger, more than one-third of US adults ≥65 years of age also use social media.2 These …