Pairing Programme – Seniors List

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Senior’s Name: Julia van Weert
Availability: 1/3
Attending ICCH 2024: In person

Pairing - Junior

Title: Professor of Health Communication
Institution: University of Amsterdam – Amsterdam School of Communication Research / ASCoR
Discipline: Communication studies
Years of experience: 20

Research

Areas of work:

  • Minorities / disadvantaged population
  • Message design
  • Oncology
  • Patient education
  • Patient–provider relationship
  • eHealth, Technology, AI

Research methods:

  • Co-design
  • Observational studies
  • (Quasi-)experiential designs
  • RCT
  • Systematic literature review

Keywords describing expertise and interest:

  1. Patient-Provider Interaction
  2. eHealth & technology

Field of expertise, major interests, and consultation topics:

I am a professor of Health Communication. My research focuses on effective health communication, in particular for groups at risk such as older patients, people with limited health literacy and migrants. We study (vulnerable) patients’ information and communication needs, information processing and effects of theory- and evidence-based health interventions. I am very interested in the added value of new media strategies in health communication, such as eHealth mHealth and AI-based technologies. I focus both on traditional and on novel, artificial intelligence based tools and I am specifically interested in the interplay between mediated communication (e.g., the use of digital tools) and patient-provider communication. This concerns for instance our understanding of how information on a website should be presented to (older) patients but also the effects of exposure to health communication technologies (e.g. a patient portal, a pre-visit website or a virtual coach) on communication during consultation. A major aim is to unravel the complicated dynamics between digital information provision and patients’ cognitive, emotional, communication and health outcomes.

Biography/CV:

Julia van Weert is Professor of Health Communication and head of the Department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam. She is founding director of the Amsterdam Center for Health Communication/ACHC, co-lead health of the national Gravitation program AlgoSoc (Public Values in the Algorithmic Society), co-lead of the ELSA Lab AI for Health Equity and board member of the UvA’s Research Priority Urban Mental Health. Van Weert is a leading person in the health communication field in Europe and beyond. She is elected Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA). Her research and that of others she supervised received many prestigious awards, including the Jozien Bensing award, Lewis Donohew Outstanding Health Communication Scholar Award, ‘ZonMw parel’ and > 40 other awards. Van Weert has ~250 publications and a large (inter)national network. She frequently appears in public debates and (inter)national news media and often gives lectures for professionals or public audiences.
At its core, her theory- driven and grant-funded research unearths underlying mechanisms of online information processing and how digital (AI-based) technologies impact health outcomes and wellbeing. She is a widely recognized scholar on digital theory- and evidence based health information interventions for underprivileged and high risk, vulnerable groups (e.g. low health literacy, older patients, migrants). She has crafted a distinctive academic signature on digital health communication, and is involved in projects such as the NWO Data2Person project SNOWDROP and the ZonMw funded project ADFICE_IT (using prediction models in clinical decision support systems), and the EU projects MentalHealth4all (digital mental health platform for migrants) and Label2Enable (trusted EU mHealth label for apps).

Read CV