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[Announcer] This podcast is presented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC – safer, healthier people.

All right, good morning everyone. How are you guys? We are thrilled to have you here today. We’re going to have a lot of fun. We have four folks who will not only educate you but entertain you and show you all kinds of new, cool stuff, but not just new and cool, it’s stuff that’s working and that’s what this is about. It really is looking at the effects and impact of new communication technologies in terms of improving the health and safety of folks. And so, what we’re going to do, I came in kind of late to the game and these folks had decided that they wanted to have a little bit different format for today. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to try not to have too many talking heads. What we’re going to do is give each person about ten minutes, kind of show and tell, let you guys see what they’re doing and then we’re going to basically talk about anything you’d like to talk about. One of the things we’re interested in talking about are some of the universal themes that you see across some of these different technologies. We can talk about health disparities in terms of audiences that we may feel are being left out of some of these technologies, but it should be a fun session. We are an extremely informal group and so ask away. We are recording this and so when you do ask questions, I’m going to be obnoxious and ask you to come to the microphone. Yes?

You guys with note taking, will we have copies of the slides available?

Yes, absolutely, they’ll be up on the site post the conference. Okay? All right, we’re going to start off first off all, though, just a very quick introduction of each of the speakers at one time and then I’m not going to do them individually, but what I was hoping that you guys could do is just tell us who you are, what you’re going to be talking about, just briefly, whether it’s blogging or gaming, etc., and then kind of how you got here. Just very quickly, how did you get in this field, what’s your background and how did you evolve to this place in your career? Nedra, do you want to start off? I’ll put the pressure on you.

No problem. Hi, I’m Nedra —is this working? I’m Nedra Kline Weinreich. I’m a social marketing consultant with—my company is called Weinreich Communications. I have a blog called Spare Change where I write about various social marketing issues and so I guess the way I got to this point, I’m going to be talking about blogging and I suppose that by starting my own blog, I’ve always like to share resources with other social marketers and this is a great way to do that and to get the word out about interesting things.

Good, great, thank you.

Hi, I’m Pam Whitten. I’m a professor at Michigan State University and I do work in the field of telemedicine, telehealth and quite candidly, the way I got into this is how I think we all fall into things we enjoy in life. Many years ago, when I was in graduate school at the University of Kansas, working on my doctorate, I was interested in health and I was interested in technology and I knew I actually wanted to do very applied work, you know, literally out with people that are sick or ill or need to be educated and so I got in the car and I drove the 20 miles from Lawrence, Kansas, to the KU Med Center campus and the med school and I started knocking on doors, what’s cool going on in here and I found this fledgling, weird thing called telemedicine and then eventually was invited to run it and start it for the state and then somehow it’s gotten bigger and messier, so I’m still involved.

And it’s still fun. It’s still fun.

Hi, I’m Erin Edgerton and I’m with CDC’s National Center for Health Marketing in the Division of eHealth Marketing and I’ve been at CDC for about two years. I came here with a background in health communication and I expected to do very traditional campaigns and had no idea that you could do such cool things related to public health. So I also fell into it by accident. Janice actually encouraged me to try new media, interactive media, online information. I mean, at first I said, no thanks. She did. I did. I really did, but it’s been excellent and I’m still learning. So I’m here just to give you a very top line overview of some of the cool things that we’re doing here.

And I’m Steve Cole. I’m the vice president for research at HopeLab Foundation and I’ll be telling you about the work that we do basically in interactive, technology-based solutions for health-related behavior change, so particularly video games and web sites are sort of the tools and trade that we use and my background, actually, I was originally trained as a social psychologist. I ended up doing work on sort of bio-behavioral interfaces, biological mechanisms by which stress and other kinds of psychological factors influence physical health. So, I’m actually a professor in the UCLA School of Medicine and I got involved with HopeLab essentially as a consultant for the biology components of their video game development enterprise and slowly, over time, came to find that more exciting and fun than what I was doing at UCLA.

[Announcer] To access the most accurate and relevant health information that affects you, your family and your community, please visit www.cdc.gov.