Online Journal of Public Health Informatics

Personas, fictional profiles representing user segments, play an important role in human-centered design, ensuring tools are tailored to the needs of users. Although public health organizations often develop information systems to promote population health, human-centered design methods and personas are generally underused in public health informatics projects.

Oral nicotine pouches (ONPs), such as Zyn, have gained popularity among young people; however, their portrayal on social media remains under-studied. Instagram memes, a widely shared form of digital communication, may shape young people’s perceptions about ONPs and contribute to the widespread acceptance of ONP use.

Older adults often access traditional media, such as newspapers, magazines, television, and radio, for health information. However, compared with older adults without frailty, older adults with frailty experience greater declines in physical functions and mental health (including depressive symptoms), as well as social functioning, due to reduced interaction with others, which limits their access to these sources of information.

Mini implants, or temporary anchorage devices, have transformed modern orthodontic practice by offering stable, minimally invasive anchorage for complex tooth movements. Despite their proven effectiveness, their use varies widely across regions, often influenced by clinicians’ knowledge, confidence, and training.

User experience has a significant impact on pharmaceutical drug effectiveness. Social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) have become prominent spaces where individuals share their medication-related experiences, especially with widely marketed drugs such as semaglutide. Despite the large volume of conversation, a comprehensive understanding of how various user subpopulations engage with semaglutide-related discussions remains underdeveloped.

For accurate medication usage statistics and medication adherence calculations, we need to have an accurate days’ supply (DS) for each prescription. Unfortunately, often the DS or the information needed for calculating the DS is not provided. Therefore, other methods need to be applied to acquire missing values or substitute incorrect values.

Public health data integration and automation systems are crucial for effective healthcare delivery and public health surveillance. However, the factors associated with hospitals' adoption and successful implementation remain inadequately explored.

COVID-19 forecasting models have been used to inform decision making around resource allocation and intervention decisions e.g., hospital beds or stay-at-home orders. State-of-the-art forecasting models often use multimodal data such as mobility or socio-demographic data to enhance COVID-19 case prediction models. Nevertheless, related work has revealed under-reporting bias in COVID-19 cases as well as sampling bias in mobility data for certain minority racial and ethnic groups, which affects the fairness of the COVID-19 predictions among racial and ethnic groups.

Loneliness is a dynamic phenomenon that can be investigated using social media and web data.

Considering the rapid digital transformation, older adults are increasingly relying on online health information seeking (OHIS) to support healthy aging. However, disparities in their digital competence levels—the ability to effectively use digital tools—and health literacy—the ability to access, understand, appraise, and apply health information—may influence engagement in OHIS.

The Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program (CHIRPP), a Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) program established in 1990, is an injury and poisoning sentinel surveillance system that collects and analyzes data on injuries to individuals who are seen at the emergency departments of numerous pediatric and general hospitals in Canada. Since its inception, the program has collected over 4 million records. The program’s surveillance activities have contributed substantially to evidence-based decision-making to reduce injuries, support research and establish preventive safeguards to protect the health and safety of Canadians. Patients presenting at participating hospitals are asked to complete a data collection form capturing the causes and circumstances contributing to the injury or poisoning event. Using this text, hospital and program staff have traditionally coded numerous surveillance variable codes manually for subsequent analysis within e-CHIRPP, the program’s purpose-built analytical application on the Canadian Network for Public Health Intelligence (CNPHI) public health informatics platform. Manual coding of this complex data is administratively burdensome and results in a significant time-lag in the availability of important surveillance findings.

Digital-based health interventions (DHIs), defined as health services delivered electronically, have demonstrated effectiveness in promoting health outcomes. However, DHIs often suffer from low user retention, a challenge attributed to limited attention to socio-cultural determinants and insufficient user engagement strategies. This paper explores participatory animation (PA), a collaborative methodology that engages community partners in co-creating animated content, as a strategy to improve DHI retention and effectiveness. Drawing from existing literature, this viewpoint examines the theoretical foundations and practical affordances of PA for enhancing digital health interventions. We describe PA as a multi-step production process that integrates participant-driven oral and visual design contributions into multimedia outputs for use in DHIs. Here, PA shows promise in producing engaging and culturally resonant content, with potential to improve intervention uptake and sustain user engagement. Despite these affordances, PA remains underutilized in health research. Given the growing urgency to develop effective, equitable DHIs, participatory animation offers a novel, community-informed approach for enhancing both design and implementation. This paper positions PA as a methodological frontier for digital health intervention science.