Empowering diversity : striving for inclusivity by leveraging the American Medical Informatics Association's "For Your Informatics" podcast

Abstract

Importance: Starting in 2018, the 'Women in American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Podcast' was women-focused, in 2021 the podcast was rebranded and relaunched as the "For Your Informatics Podcast"(FYI) to expand the scope of the podcast to include other historically underrepresented groups. That expansion of the scope, together with a rebranding and marketing campaign, led to a larger audience and engagement of the AMIA community. Objectives: The goals of this case report are to characterize our rebranding and expanding decisions, and to assess how they impacted our listenership and engagement to achieve the Podcast goals of increasing diversity among the Podcast team, guests, audience, and improve audience engagement. Materials and Methods: This descriptive case study is focused on the FYI Podcast team's processes to develop a revised mission, vision, and values, increase the diversity of guests, augment listenership through social media, and track the reach through the number of followers, downloads, and impressions. Results: As of December 2023, 35 FYI Podcast episodes are available with 685 social media followers, over 20 000 downloads, and nearly 145 000 impressions. In addition to introductions to informatics and loyal listeners within AMIA, the FYI Podcast episodes have been used by students as teaching material in a graduate biomedical informatics curriculum, and as introductory material for student clubs and programs. Discussion: The Podcast relaunching led to 98% of guests from underrepresented groups and growth in listenership by 329% since May 2021. Conclusion: The FYI Podcast supports AMIA's diversity mission, and gives voices to underrepresented groups, engages the clinical informatics community in critical conversations on justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, and supports education.