HIPE Lab

Did you know an average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data each day?

According to the University of California this is an increase of over 350 percent over the past decades.

That means if you were to take a three-by-five-inch index card and then spread them out side by side just your share of this information would cover every square inch of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.

That is a lot of information. our brains are just not built to process that much information. Our mental filters are literally on overdrive. 

There's a limit to the traffic of information we can pay conscious attention to at any one time, so we build cognitive shortcuts and only allow certain information in.

On top of the everyday information that our brain has to process there's been a steady increase in miss and disinformation on social media so it's only logical that some of that information, especially the ones that triggers our interest and is persuasive, would make it past our mental filters.

The world health organization has called this flood of information an “infodemic.” 

An infodemic occurs when there is too much information that includes miss and disinformation during a disease outbreak. 

What is mis- and disinformation? Misinformation is false or inaccurate information that is spread in an unintentional way. Whereas disinformation also contains false or inaccurate information that is spread with an intent to deceive.

Both mis- and disinformation make it confusing for people to make good decisions about their health and the health of those around them and can negatively impact health outcomes in a population.

What can we do about it? MITRE developed the Health Information Persuasion Lab or HIPE Lab for short to address this critical public safety issue.

The HIPE Lab is designed to help public health professionals gain greater insights into how to combat health myths and disinformation in their communities.

There are three parts to the HIPE Lab:

1. HIPE interactive dashboard. The HIPE interactive dashboard provides actionable insights to miss and disinformation that enables a rapid response and counter messaging strategies.
2. Social Journey. The social journey tells the story of how different people's health decisions are influenced by the many sources of information they encounter throughout their day. You can follow different people as they navigate all of the health information to make decisions about getting a COVID-19 vaccine.
3. Ground game. This is a space to test and research ongoing health-related miss and disinformation topics and apply the findings to real-world challenges. 

Let's take a look at how HIPE lab works:

In a real-life case study Miami Dade county faced a challenge with low COVID-19 vaccination rates among black and Haitian communities.

We used the hype dashboard to understand what people in their community were talking about it highlighted the major themes and mis- and disinformation around vaccines.

It also showed what type of persuasion drivers were being used particularly with anti-vaccine messages. This helped health communication scientists to develop targeted messaging to not only counter the mis- and disinformation but help the community members to get accurate information in plain language so that they could make informed health decisions about the COVID-19 vaccine.

HIPE Lab provides the data and insights to health communication and public health professionals so that they can create evidence-based strategies to help communities make informed health decisions for better health outcomes.

The HIPE Lab: Building the healthy information environment for the future you.