History of CDCynergy

In mid-1992, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. William L. Roper, established a task force to study and make recommendations about future directions for communication at the CDC. The study did not recommend any major actions be taken to strengthen the agency's public affairs activities. It did recommend further integration of health communication into the agency's infrastructure.

An office for communication in the Office of the Director was suggested and became a reality in 1996. The new office combined a newly organized division concerning health communication with a pre-existing office of public affairs creating the Division of Health Communication and the Media Relations Division within the new Office of Communication. It was hoped that this central office of communication would serve as a model for emerging communication offices across the agency and help build health communication capacity through training, research, and program development activities.

The first two employees assigned to the Division of Health Communication were Fred Kroger and Dr. Galen Cole, previously of the National AIDS Information and Education Program, the unit responsible for the "America Responds to AIDS" and "Business Responds to AIDS" campaigns. Kroger became the director of the new Division of Health Communication.

One of the first projects taken on by the new division was to identify a model that could be used to plan communication activities within the newly emerging agency-wide health communication infrastructure. Finding no pre-existing prototype that fulfilled all the required needs, it was determined that a new model for communication planning must be created. Dr. Cole, assisted by Dr. Susan Kirby and Dr. Christine Prue, was assigned to lead this initiative.

The three-year [1995-1998] development process entailed contracting with WESTAT, Inc., a research firm with information technology capabilities. The team leader at WESTAT was Dr. Tim Edgar. The combined CDC/WESTAT team then implemented an exhaustive inductive process designed to determine what experts believed were the steps required to plan and integrate health communication within a larger public health framework. It was decided that the plan must be designed to use terms and principles that were familiar to both communicators and public health professionals. It must also include resources and examples that corresponded with each step in the planning process. After extensive testing and scrutiny by experts from a variety of disciplines within public health, the beta version of the planning model was released for training and planning purposes on June 17, 1998.

The original 1998 version was widely accepted both inside and outside of the agency. After using the disk to train over 600 public health professionals both in the US and abroad, sufficient information was gathered identifying both the strengths and the weaknesses of the model in terms of the process and the technology. This information was used to justify a major revision of the popular disk.

The Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) was hired to redesign the planning tool using the information gathered in planning and training sessions as a guide. Susan J. Robinson of CDC's Division of Health Communication took the lead in modifying the technology and Dr. Cole, assisted by Dr. Brad Neiger, Dr. Michael Barnes, and Dr. Rhonda Kercsmar, led the content and process revisions. Team leaders at ORISE were Eileen Sample, for Instructional Design, and Christopher Giles, for Programming. The new version was completed in 2000 and "CDCynergy 2001" was released in February of 2001.

Because many health communication groups at the CDC were hesitant to adopt either the original or the newly revised version of CDCynergy, the Director of the Office of Communication, Dr. Vicki Freimuth suggested that the various Centers, Institutes, and Offices (CIOs) of the CDC be approached with the idea of developing tailored editions of CDCynergy.

The first CIO to adopt the idea of a specialized edition of the disk was the Office on Smoking and Health (OSH). Jeff McKenna, Chief of Health Communications for OSH, agreed to allocate funds to develop a version of CDCynergy that was tailored to planning tobacco prevention and control communication programs. The idea of tailoring the CDCynergy planning model rapidly caught on across the CDC and has expanded to Cardiovascular Health, Immunization, and Diabetes. It became evident a manager for the project was needed. Varian C. Brandon took on the job as manager of CDCynergy in September of 2000, assisted by A. Brittney Anderson.

As more editions were developed, CDCynergy 2001 became known as the Basic edition. In January of 2002, work began on an edition which broadened the scope of the planning model. Entitled CDCynergy XE, this edition expanded the tool from its initial focus of communication planning to a tool that can be used to systematically conceptualize, plan, execute, and evaluate a comprehensive public health program.

To supplement the domestic editions, Dr. Claudia Fishman Parvanta, the new Director of the Division of Health Communication, persuaded the Maternal and Child Nutrition Branch at the CDC to develop an international micronutrient edition of CDCynergy, the adaptation of which was coordinated by Emily A. Bobrow. This disk was released in the fall of 2001 and has been widely accepted in various international settings.

As the number of tailored editions began to grow and the demand for the Basic disk increased, training for CDCynergy was the next topic area to be addressed by the Division of Health Communication. Initially taught by Division personnel, the classes soon became so popular that requests for training quickly became more than the small staff could handle. To remedy the problem, the DHC sought out partners who would agree to provide training to individuals and groups outside the agency. The first partner to agree to this arrangement was the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE). Once again, ORISE was contracted to design a trainer's course and manual. In February, 2002, a two-day Train-the-Trainer workshop led by both ORISE and CDC trainers was held in Atlanta with twenty-two candidates from SOPHE regional chapters.

In January, prior to the national train-the-trainer workshop with SOPHE, an international course was organized by Dr. Parvanta and Ms. Bobrow. Representatives from Russia, Thailand, The Kyrgyz Republic, Sweden, South Africa, Egypt, Tunisia, and China arrived in Atlanta and participated in the week-long, hands-on workshop. In March, an international training course was held in Cyprus. This three-week course was taught by some of the candidates trained in Atlanta in January. The current version of CDCynergy Micronutrients is being translated into several European and Asian languages and is being used in the curriculums of universities in Sweden, Thailand, and South Africa. Additional training courses are being held around the world.

In the meantime, SOPHE trainers continue to train students across the country in how to systematically plan, execute, and evaluate health communication intervention programs.

What started out as a preliminary project in a newly created division at the CDC has become a standard for planning communication within public health. Moreover, the name CDCynergy has become a brand name for systematic public health planning both nationally and internationally.