Success Stories

ORAU’s Auto-INFORM Successful in Analyzing Emerging Health Issues

Staying abreast of the latest media coverage on emerging health issues is an essential part of analyzing the effectiveness of your health communication message.

Since 2001, Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) has partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and its National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases to help monitor messages through media analysis, which allows the CDC to more quickly respond to the most pressing health issues.

To improve the overall consistency and efficiency of the process, ORAU recently automated its original INFORM media analysis program and renamed it Auto-INFORM, which is used to monitor news articles, blogs, and Web content related to health concerns and codes the information at 100 times the speed of humans.

On average, we track, code, and analyze more than 17,000 articles daily, monitoring 1,400+ news resources and 1,000+ blogs. Since the startup of Auto-INFORM (January 2008) and up through March 2009, the system has coded, analyzed, and archived approximately four million articles. Annually, the media analysis process has grown to process more than 3,903,897 articles. Auto-INFORM will soon use a listserv to deliver a variety of topic reports to our clients to fit their individual needs.

From the results, ORAU uncovers media interest and public perceptions of an issue, evaluates the effectiveness of media efforts, and then benchmarks for success.

Soon, Auto-INFORM will be further enhanced to include monitoring health messages from social networks like Twitter for coding and analysis.

In addition, ORAU has partnered with CDC and its Office on Smoking and Health to track, code, and analyze 75 to 100 articles daily from selected national and local newspapers, television networks, and news wires. Trade journals are also included for coding and analysis, as well as the ability to evaluate the reliability of the coding scheme.