From the Schools of Public Health

However, a chal- lenge remaining in the field is the lack of ability to effectively translate and disseminate findings from health communica- tion research so that practitioners, researchers, and students can apply best practices of health communication to public health interventions and programs. To help address this chal- lenge, the Center for Public Health Communication (CPHC) at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University was selected to design and develop a web-based "research- to-practice" synthesis and dissemination tool called the "HealthComm Key." This web-based application, conceived and developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Pre- vention (CDC) during the 1990s, was created to be a single comprehensive resource of published, data-driven health com- munication literature "focusing on communication research and practice within the context of public health." 2 With sup- port from what is now known as the National Center for Health Marketing at the CDC and the Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH), the Emory CPHC team developed and implemented a detailed plan to reformat the article annotation database structure, update and expand the vol- ume of annotated summaries accessible to public users, and improve the web-based tool's functionality and usability by implementing a "Google-style" search engine. Further, addi- tional variables were added to HealthComm Key to facilitate analysis of health communication research trends, study syn- thesis, and meta-analyses. HealthComm Key, in its current version (http://www. healthcommkey.org), now contains regularly updated article summaries presented in a manner and language designed to be understandable for practitioners and students. This ar- ticle reviews the development of the HealthComm Key, high- lights its key features and components, describes the annota- tion process, presents data on its development and use, and discusses future plans for expansion and implementation.