This position is part of the Maryland Consumer Health Information Hub team in the UMD Horowitz Center for Health Literacy. Please see the Horowitz Center website for information about the Center, the Hub and its activities, and the authorizing legislation. The Information Outreach Faculty Assistant will plan, collect feedback and revise, and implement the Hub’s activities in collaboration with other Hub team members.
This position has a primary and secondary purpose.
The primary purpose is to identify and collaborate with Maryland organizations to increase public access to plain language health, safety, insurance, and social services benefits information. These organizations include but aren’t limited to state and local government agencies, health systems, nonprofit and community based organizations, libraries, consumer referral services, and educational institutions. The Outreach Assistant will use the Hub’s plain language and language access criteria to identify consumer materials from these organizations and help amplify and disseminate the materials through the Hub’s and other organizations’ communication channels.
The Information Outreach Assistant will work closely with the Community Partner Outreach Assistant to plan and manage organizational contacts and relationships. The Information Outreach Assistant will be primarily responsible for collaborating with public and medical libraries and consumer informational referral services, such as 211, MDThink, and local websites and information aggregation services.
The secondary purpose of this position is to develop and deliver consumer/patient focused presentations on how to search for and evaluate the quality and suitability of health information and services. These presentations may be in-person, virtual, and hybrid and will likely happen in close coordination with Hub partner organizations. The Outreach Faculty Assistant will build on existing Hub resources and work with Hub team members and partner organizations to customize presentations for different public audiences.
Duties:
- Participate in team meetings and coordinate with Hub team members
- Participate in 1-2 annual in-person Hub convenings
- Inform supervisors of partnerships, work products, deadlines, and roadblocks or challenges
- Contribute to Hub tracking and reports
- Create a partnership and information outreach plan, including a tracking system and schedule, in collaboration with the Partner Outreach Assistant and ask for feedback from internal and external colleagues
- Identify and manage a multilingual collection of health, safety, insurance and social services benefits information from partner organizations that the Hub can distribute/amplify
- Identify Hub and partner organization channels to distribute and amplify consumer information throughout Maryland, and implement distribution/amplification
- Present the Hub to partners and triage technical assistance requests to Hub team members
- Research and recommend audience-appropriate formats and channels to increase information distribution/amplification
- Monitor and recommend new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) tools, that may affect information distribution/amplification
- Promote language access strategies to partner organizations
- Develop and deliver in-person, virtual, and hybrid consumer/patient focused presentations on how to search for and evaluate the quality and suitability of health information and services
- Other duties as assigned