RADx-UP hosted its third annual COVID-19 Equity Evidence Academy on September 28 and 29. This online conference brought together RADx-UP project teams and their community partners along with invited speakers to discuss COVID-19 testing equity through messaging accuracy and accessibility.

“For this third Equity Evidence Academy, we aimed to increase RADx-UP team members’ and stakeholders' awareness of the complex factors associated with COVID-19 messaging and misinformation,” says Lori Carter-Edwards, MD, MPH, event director and assistant dean for community engagement at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine.

Keynote talks, breakout presentations, and roundtable discussions allowed participants to collaboratively identify strategies for promoting accurate, accessible, and trustworthy information.

“Information that is both scientifically accurate and culturally appropriate is crucial to strengthening the resiliency of communities, and we are grateful to all the participants, presenters, and keynote speakers for their dedication to promoting messaging accuracy about COVID-19 testing and vaccines,” said Carter-Edwards.

“Getting accurate information to communities has been essential to addressing the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Cameron Webb, MD, JD, a senior policy advisor for equity on the White House COVID-19 Response Team, in the opening talk. “The [COVID-19] testing effort was essential to everything: before vaccines, before therapeutics, the testing effort was crucial.”

Amelie Ramirez, DrPH, director of the Latino health advocacy organization “Salud America!, gave the event’s closing address. “We frame all our issues around equity and data and potential solutions that individuals can download and utilize in their communities,” said Ramirez. “We fuel all these different channels of social media with content driven by health equity and scientific theories in mind and using a holistic digital content curation strategy. Our curators go out and find a story and relate it to our social determinants of health and what it is that we're trying to change. We then craft that information into a very interesting story written in different formats.

”This Evidence Academy also included a new session called Advancing Community and Academic Partnerships that featured 12 RADx-UP project teams explaining the community-engagement strategies they’re using in their research partnerships.

“It’s through events such as the Equity Evidence Academy that we hope to inspire people to continue to work together to understand and take action to promote equity through the science and practice of community engagement in COVID-19 testing,” said Carter-Edwards.

“Our ability to replicate what works by sharing with others is critical to building our collective capacity for better environments, better relationships, and better health.”

Interactive Data Profile

Although the event is over, you can still watch recorded sessions and view the presentation slide decks via the conference website (start on the Schedule of Events on the features menu).

“We also hope that people continue to make use of the Data Profile 2022 reference resource, which we re-designed to be more interactive and relevant before, during, and after the event,” said Renee Leverty, the program’s other co-lead.

That easy-to-use online resource is organized across six theme summaries exploring social media messaging, policy, the power of data visualizations, the ‘infodemic’, health literacy, and information accessibility. The Data Profile includes embedded graphs, case studies, and interviews with project teams. Explore it in English or in Spanish.

Learn more about this and previous conferences in the RADx-UP COVID-19 Equity Evidence Academy Program here.