Health Departments Get Mixed Marks for Using Web to Communicate About Flu Crisis, RAND Study Finds.

Byline: RAND Corporation

SANTA MONICA, Calif., July 7 (AScribe Newswire) -- State and local health departments get mixed marks for efforts to convey information about the H1N1 virus to the public using their Web sites immediately after U.S. officials declared a public health emergency in April, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

While 46 of 50 state health departments posted some information about the outbreak within 24 hours of the federal announcement, the performance of local health departments was inconsistent. Just one-third of the 153 local health departments studied posted information to their Web sites within 24 hours of the announcement, although larger jurisdictions did better, according to the RAND Health study published online by the journal Health Affairs.

Performance varied widely among local health departments across the five states that had confirmed cases at the outset of the epidemic -- California, Texas, New York, Ohio and Kansas. While 73 percent of the California counties sampled provided some online information, just 8 percent of the counties in Kansas and 18 percent of the Texas counties quickly provided information online, according to the study.

Researchers say the outbreak of the H1N1 flu provided a rare opportunity to evaluate the performance of state and local health departments during an actual emergency.

"We found that the capability to conduct basic crisis and emergency risk communication is quite good at the state level, but there remains significant variation at the local level," said Jeanne Ringel, lead author of the report and a senior economist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. "We concluded there is room for improvement at all levels, particularly in the area of providing information in languages other than English."

Since 2001 federal, state and local governments across the United States have invested heavily in preparing for public health emergencies and measuring how well the nation is prepared. RAND researchers examined health agencies' use of Web-based communications directed to the public because crisis and emergency risk communication is one of the central components of emergency response.