How YouTube is trying to combat health misinformation

Long gone are the days when YouTube was simply a platform for cute cat videos and unicorns named Charlie. These days, people come to YouTube looking for answers to all sorts of questions, including ones regarding their health.

Amid a pandemic-promoted wave of health misinformation, the media platform started YouTube Health in 2021 with the goal of making accurate health information accessible to consumers.

“To combat the societal threat of medical misinformation, we’re working to fill the health information space with digestible, compelling, and emotionally supportive health videos,” its website states, adding that “everyone can learn from leading medical experts regardless of who they are or where they live.”

How it works

Under the YouTube Health initiative, the company partnered with several healthcare organizations, including traditional health systems like Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and Mass General Brigham in Boston, as well as online health education platforms like Osmosis and Psych Hub. Other partners include the medical journal the New England Journal of Medicine, the World Health Organization, and the American Public Health Association.

These health organizations created videos on a range of health topics, which YouTube curates in what it calls “carousels” and labels to indicate that the information comes from reputable sources. If someone searches for information on diabetes, for example, they’ll get a carousel of videos from the health partners on diabetes.

“Gone are the days of flyers and billboards in terms of reaching people,” Garth Graham, managing director and global head of healthcare and public health at Google/YouTube, told Healthcare Brew. “We know that patients and users already come to YouTube looking for health information, and we want to make sure that we’re able to get them information from authoritative sources.”

Amanda Todorovich, Cleveland Clinic’s executive director of digital marketing, told Healthcare Brew the partnership with YouTube Health “fit perfectly into our content strategy of providing useful, helpful, and relevant information when and where you need it.”

“Over the past few years, there has been an increased need to share credible health information and battle misinformation,” Todorovich said. “This relationship was a great opportunity to provide authoritative health information in an engaging way and reach a new audience on YouTube.”

Todorovich said Cleveland Clinic is measuring the overall growth of its YouTube channel and subscriber count. It is focused on creating “credible and engaging health content,” she said.

“What differentiates us from other creators is that we’re a health system with access to some of the best medical experts in the world, and every piece of content we create gets reviewed and approved by those experts,” Todorovich said.

Looking to the future

One of YouTube Health’s main goals is ensuring the platform has videos that target a number of major health conditions, according to Graham.

“We don’t really measure in views per se,” Graham said. “The goalpost is on making sure we have enough content to answer the full library of questions that people come to YouTube for.”

YouTube Health has partnered with Doctor Mike, a primary care physician with more than 11 million subscribers on YouTube and 4.5 million followers on Instagram at the time of writing. He creates videos like “What causes hiccups and how to stop them” and “One health hack from every type of doctor.”

“​​Being a primary care physician, I recognize the importance of meeting patients where they are, and right now that’s on YouTube,” Doctor Mike said in a statement on YouTube Health’s website. “In fact, the platform has evolved to allow evidence-based physicians to collaborate with major health organizations to counter misinformation directly at the source.”

In the future, the company hopes to recruit more individual clinicians to create videos, whether that’s doctors, nurses, psychologists, or other medical providers, Graham told Healthcare Brew.

“We’re really focused on getting those people engaged in creating health information, and reaching folks at scale,” he said.

YouTube Health is also looking to expand beyond consumer-centric content into content geared toward medical professionals, according to Graham. The platform is hoping to incorporate continuing medical education, he said, so it eventually has not only “clinicians who create information for consumers but also clinicians who create information for other clinicians.”

The YouTube Health initiative has been “very successful” so far in terms of the goals it set out to accomplish, Graham said.

“When we started out on this journey, this kind of way in which people were trying to reach patients was not what you would traditionally think of in healthcare,” he said. “Over the last year or two, what you’ve seen is big hospital systems leaning forward in terms of innovative ways to reach people.”