Public health does not have an information shortage.

Every week, researchers publish new findings on behavioral health, infectious disease, health equity, workforce, implementation, chronic disease, policy, and dozens of other areas. Add reports, guidance, evaluations, and emerging practices, and the challenge becomes obvious: no public health professional can reasonably keep up with all of it.

The problem is no longer simply finding evidence.

The problem is figuring out which evidence deserves your attention.

And that answer isn’t the same for everyone.

A health department director thinking about workforce capacity needs something different from an evaluator working on implementation. A communications director may see immediate value in research that a hospital executive would reasonably skip. Even two people interested in behavioral health may need very different evidence depending on the decisions they make.

That got us thinking: what if we stopped asking everyone to navigate the same stream of research?

Then introduce what you built

At Dawn Chorus and PubTrawlr, we’ve been experimenting with a different approach.

We built a personalized version of This Week in Public Health that starts with three simple questions:

Where do you work? What do you do? What are you most interested in?

Those answers are used to prioritize research from our evidence database based on its relevance to the reader. The system then selects five studies and translates them into a short briefing—explaining not only what researchers found, but why those findings may matter for that person’s work.

And rather than describe it, we’d rather let you try it.

The bigger opportunity: evidence that adapts to context

The interesting part isn’t the newsletter.

It’s what this approach suggests about how organizations could interact with evidence.

Imagine a health department where an executive, epidemiologist, program manager, evaluator, and communications specialist don’t all receive the same 20-page evidence digest. Instead, the underlying evidence base remains the same while what gets surfaced—and how it is explained—changes according to the decisions each person needs to make.

That’s a fundamentally different model of knowledge translation.

It moves us from: More information → better decisions

toward: Relevant evidence + organizational context → better opportunities for evidence use

And importantly, personalization shouldn’t mean telling people only what they want to hear. A useful evidence system still needs breadth, transparency, methodological safeguards, and opportunities for unexpected findings to surface. The goal isn’t to create an evidence echo chamber.

It’s to make the enormous amount of knowledge we already produce more usable.

Closing

We’re starting with five studies and three questions.

But we’re interested in a much larger question:

What would evidence dissemination look like if it were designed around the people expected to use the evidence?

Try the personalized issue builder above. Put in your actual role and interests and see what comes back.

And if you’re working in a health department, health system, nonprofit, or other organization wrestling with how to get the right evidence to the right people, that’s a conversation we’d particularly like to have.