YouTube partners with Morehouse, others on health equity videos

YouTube on Monday launched a program to help health-focused not-for-profits create educational videos about disparities in mental, maternal and other healthcare.

YouTube and Kaiser Family Foundation will provide video training and resources for staff at not-for-profits that support underrepresented and underserved communities. The program is designed to help organizations get health information to a broader audience through YouTube. The program is dubbed THE-IQ, for tackling health equity through information quality.

The first three participants are the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine, which will create videos on root causes of health disparities; the Loveland Foundation, which will focus on mental healthcare access for Black women and girls; and the National Birth Equity Collaborative, focused on Black maternal and infant health.

KFF will work with the three organizations to develop their video series. YouTube will distribute around $500,000 to support the not-for-profits’ work and help develop their YouTube channels.

The program’s goal is to help not-for-profits translate scientific information in a way that’s engaging and approachable for the public, said Dr. Garth Graham, director and global head of YouTube Health. 

Social media companies and health systems alike have sought to address a deluge of false information related to COVID-19—dubbed an “infodemic” by the World Health Organization—and other health issues. YouTube last year banned false claims about vaccines that have been approved by health authorities, such as flu and measles immunizations.

Boston-based Mass General Brigham, Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic, the American Public Health Association and the New England Journal of Medicine previously partnered with YouTube to publish health-related content, which YouTube has said it prioritizes in its search algorithms.

The Satcher Health Leadership Institute started working with Google in 2020, when the institute was awarded a grant to create a COVID-19 health equity database, which included data about COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths broken out by race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status and other demographic factors.

Through the new program, the Satcher Health Leadership Institute will develop its YouTube channel, which as of today has 268 subscribers and 29,580 views across its videos.

The institute is still refining its strategy for YouTube, but it could be a good way to engage a younger audience, said Daniel Dawes, executive director of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute. The institute is also considering new approaches, such as animated videos, and will assess what styles of video appeal to different audiences.

“Our audience has been an older group of existing public health and healthcare leaders,” Dawes said. “I’d like to see us really expand our reach.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article mistitled YouTube executive Dr. Garth Graham.