Our information environment is transforming—including the places and people who help us make decisions about our health. Those health information ecosystems are fragmented; filled with information from a wide range of expertise and sources; and platform algorithms exert tremendous and unseen control over what messages are seen, shared, and amplified. These changes have many of our traditional health information sources racing to learn new skills to ensure they remain trusted and relevant as we build effective information ecosystems.

Our organizations are focusing on the people and institutions that play key roles in health information ecosystems. We are helping them to adapt and to continue supporting the public in meeting their health goals. This article presents insights from our recent conversations with researchers, practitioners, funders, and many others working in this area, including examples of how philanthropy is supporting work to create and sustain robust and resilient health information ecosystems.

Insight 1: Building Effective Information Ecosystems Is Complex

The public faces challenges in finding and using information to meet their health goals that go beyond the need to sort rumors from accurate content. Our information environment is shaped by policies, practices, resource flows, relationships, power dynamics, and mental models—all of which interact and influence one another in complex ways.

Our understanding of the social determinants of health has helped us recognize that health disparities are more than the result of individual decisions and behaviors. Applying a similar systems perspective to our health information ecosystems helps us identify the conditions that underlie these challenges and recognize the leverage points where shifts can lead to positive change (Kania, Kramer, Senge 2018; Fraser 2024).

Solutions that focus on individual behaviors, such as media literacy training for the public or communication skill-building for practitioners, can then be seen as key parts of a complex whole; and their outcomes, successes, and informative failures can also be better understood through this broader lens.

Implications for Funder Strategy

Funders can support work across the conditions that lead to systems change. For example, practices are shifting as health communicators and other professionals adapt their approaches (see below).  Access to information is a key resource within communities, and support for local media outlets (for example, Press Forward Locals) is ensuring that more people can find and use the information they need to make decisions that affect their health and wellbeing.

Read the full article about building healthier information ecosystems by Diana L. Stilwell, Elizabeth Gould, and Nalini Padmanabhan at Grantmakers In Health.