Background
Gary L. Kreps, Ph.D., FAAHB, FICA: Gary Kreps is University Distinguished Professor of Communication at George Mason University, where he also serves as the Founding Director of the Center for Health and Risk Communication (CHRC). As University Distinguished Professor, Dr. Kreps teaches numerous graduate courses on fundamental and advanced health communication research, consumer-provider health communication, digital health communication, intercultural and international health and risk communication, and health communication campaigns. Over the course of his career, Dr. Kreps has been a pioneering advocate for health communication as a professional and academic discipline. In 1976, he helped to establish the first formal health communication professional division at the International Communication Association, the ICA Health Communication Division, which he subsequently chaired for two terms. Additionally, Dr. Kreps also established the National Communication Association’s Health Communication Division and served as the Founding Chair of the Division. During his tenure chairing these new Divisions he helped to create innovative health communication programs, initiatives, and awards that helped build health communication research and application, establishing this area of study as an important and far-reaching field of scholarship.
Dr. Kreps has also been an active scholar in the field of health communication, working as an official with major federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the NIH’s National Cancer Institute to implement new health communication research programs and initiatives to promote public health. At the National Cancer Institute, he established the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch (HCIRB), where he introduced major national research and outreach programs to reduce the national burdens from cancers. He has served as a scientific advisor for the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), helping advance effective communication with health care consumers and providers to address major health threats. He also advises important international health agencies, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), and leaders from the Ministries of Health of many nations to advance public health promotion policies and practices. He is a founding member of the Society for Health Communication, serves as a Fellow of both the International Communication Association and the American Academy for Health Behavior (where he was elected as the 2015 Research Laureate), and has been designated as a National Communication Association Distinguished Scholar.
Health information dissemination and use is a major area of focus in Gary’s health research and outreach programs:
Dr. Kreps oversaw, introduced, and directed the groundbreaking Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) research program as Chief of the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch at the National Cancer Institute. HINTS is a major source of scientific health information that has now been conducted on a regular schedule for more than two decades by the NCI and has become a major federal public health research program (see: https://hints.cancer.gov/). The HINTS research program gathers representative national US data about public access to and use of health information to guide important health decisions and behaviors by health care consumers, providers, and policy makers, including identifying specific important health information gaps and needs. HINTS data are used by government health agencies, public health departments, and health care delivery centers to guide development and implementation of evidence-based health promotion interventions for at-risk populations, as well as to evaluate past health education efforts and to test important health promotion hypotheses and theories.
Over the past decade, Gary has extended the use of HINTS data with immigrant populations and in many foreign countries with culturally-sensitive adaptations of the NCI HINTS surveys conducted in native languages and examining local health issues. He currently coordinates the INSIGHTS (International Studies to Investigate Global Health Information Trends) research consortium, where health information surveys based upon HINTS are conducted regularly in 23 different countries across 5 continents, including China, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Israel, South Africa, Chile, Singapore, and Hong Kong, with new programs being introduced in multiple countries. The INSIGHTS research program is a robust source of relevant health data, that has adapted and extended HINTS instruments and data, with national and cross-national reports about health information access and use disseminated widely to spur supplementary research programs and broad public health applications.
While serving as Chief of HCIRB, Dr. Kreps also helped to introduce and manage several major extramural research programs, where academic researchers were funded to conduct cutting-edge health communication research. These initiatives included the Centers of Excellence in Cancer Communication Research, where large transdisciplinary multi-year research centers were established to conduct programmatic research about cancer communication in the delivery of care, dissemination of health information, use of online information systems, influence of relevant health behaviors, and use of media for influencing cancer-related beliefs and behaviors. The Intervention Research Program was established to fund innovative research to test innovative strategies for improving cancer communication programs within local communities and with at-risk populations. The Digital Divide Pilot Projects were introduced to test the best ways to use online and digital information systems to disseminate health information to poor, elderly, minority, and disenfranchised populations. In addition, he supervised a far-reaching Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR) in Multi-Media Cancer Communication to fund development of new start-up companies to develop and institutionalize innovative cancer communication educational tools and programs to improve health outcomes from cancer.
There were many lessons learned from these research programs that can be applied to community-level health promotion efforts. For example, we found from this research that intercultural communication competence and sensitivity were crucial factors for successful delivery of care from both the consumers’ and providers’ perspectives. This information can be incorporated into evidence-based training programs to prepare staff members to work effectively with members of at-risk patient populations. We realized that effective health communication must address both content-related health issues effectively to help guide informed decision-making, as well as relational concerns to help address emotional issues related to health and illness to reduce fear and anxiety, while promoting trust, compassion, and social support.
We also learned that the best health communication efforts use a variety of media and message strategies to meet the unique information needs and preferences of different audiences. There is no one right way to communicate about health. That is why is it is important to develop health promotion programs based upon relevant audience and needs analysis research data. Community-based health promotion programs must be designed and implemented in collaboration with members of the audiences these programs are intended for to make sure they are appropriate, interesting, understandable, and usable for community members. Since health issues and health communication needs evolve over time, it is important to build community health promotion programs to adapt to new health risks and communication preferences. For example, social media has developed as a widely used and powerful channel of communication, but it is not often used to it full potential to disseminate relevant health information. Attention must be given to unique audience communication competencies, access to communication channels and tools, and needs for health information to design the best comprehensive community-based health communication programs that evolve to meet changing information demands.
The COVID-19 pandemic has really reinforced the importance of effective health communication for disseminating needed health information, providing social support, and even for providing health care services digitally since many people are staying close to home to avoid contagion and have been relying on the use of online communication systems. This has been a boon for the study of e-health, which is important because it appears that we will need to communicate using a variety of channels, with preferred information sources, to meet deep health information needs, especially during health emergencies, such as pandemics. Kreps believes the future is bright for using effective health communication that engages different audiences, provides them with relevant information and support, to help guide informed decisions making that can promote wellbeing across society.
