Not sure where to get your vaccines? What about colon cancer screenings?
Health Confianza launched a new one-stop shop health literacy program aimed at providing everything Bexar County residents need to know about preventive health.
The new county-funded initiative, unveiled on Friday, is the organization’s latest effort to boost health literacy in a culturally-relevant and accessible format.
The campaign includes a new website, collaborations with community organizations, and yes, AI. Bexar County residents will soon be able to ask an artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot preventive health questions and get localized answers.
“It is overwhelming how much information is out there,” said Jason Rosenfeld, co-director of the organization. “What we’ve tried to do is give a one-stop shop: here is the information that is most important around preventive health [including] vaccines, health screenings, when to visit your doctor, lifestyle issues and even maintaining your mental wellness.”
Health Confianza is operated under the city’s Metropolitan Health District, UT Health San Antonio and Texas A&M University-San Antonio. The program was established at the height of the pandemic in 2021 with a federal grant and focuses on improving health literacy in San Antonio, especially as it related to the COVID-19 virus.
The organization’s mission has widened to providing general, accessible health information to help residents make informed decisions, something that has become increasingly challenging in an age of information overload and a complex healthcare system, said Health Confianza co-director Melanie Stone.
“Part of the problem is the info-demic that we have with health information in this day and age,” she said. “You can get information from your healthcare provider, but you could also get it from your neighbor, your social media and political ads. People have lots of information, which can be a good thing, but it also can be something that creates a [barrier] to informed decision making.”
Health guidelines and recommendations are often filled with jargon, difficult to understand and not actionable, the leaders explained.
The idea with the latest health campaign was to put everything residents needed together in a user-friendly and culturally competent format — distributed via the new website wellnesscultura.org, Health Confianza community health workers and through community nonprofits that interact with the community such as food banks and housing organizations.
The pandemic widened a fracturing trust between public health officials and the community, a trend that had already been underway but has since accelerated.
It was important for Health Confianza to get good information in front of residents, and that meant meeting them where they already were, Stone and Rosenfeld said.
“[Residents] do go to their community center, their food bank, their church, their neighborhood association,” Stone said. “Those organizations were where people were asking for health information, particularly during the pandemic. They were asking about COVID and about the vaccine when it became available, and those organizations were not necessarily equipped to be able to handle that.”
Health Confianza is partnering with a number of community-based organizations as part of the new initiative, including Southside Collaborative, which works toward connecting residents with health, education and other resources.
“We’re very short on dentists, behavioral health, across the board. We’re just lacking a lot of things,” said Edward Castillo, director of Southside Collaborative. “If you talk about the South Side, yes, it is access, but there are programs that exist within the city that are open to all. Transportation can be an issue to get there, but it’s also a factor that not a lot of people know about these programs.”
The new website contains information on health screenings, vaccines, mental health, lifestyle factors and other preventive health information curated for different groups, like resources for men versus women, and different age groups. It also contains information on available affordable health services and clinics around Bexar County.
Health Confianza is also working on a chatbot trained in health literacy to help users navigate and ask questions about their health.
Health Confianza partnered with Rest of The World, an Austin-based advertising agency, to make the information on the website more user-friendly and relevant to Bexar County’s Hispanic population. Public health and advertising is an uncommon pairing, but it made sense for both organizations, Stone said.
“Both groups are trying to get people to take action,” she said. “We want people to take actions for healthy behaviors. Advertisers want people to buy products, but they know how to get people to be influenced … and it’s always struck me: why do public health people not embrace those strategies?”
