Michael O. Rich, MD, MPH

Boston Children's Hospital

Academic Titles

Associate Professor, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School Of Public Health

Associate Professor, Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School

Research Program Affiliation

Member, Cancer Risk, Prevention, and Early Detection

Research Abstract

Having come to medicine after a twelve-year career as a filmmaker; I am cognizant of the image and of the primacy of mass media as a source of information and influence. My current research brings together my experience in medicine and communications, focusing on media as a force which affects health and health behavior and as a tool for medical research, education, health care policy, and advocacy. I am a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Public Education, whose mandate is to study and disseminate information on the effects of and uses for communications media in child health, and I am a member of the Editorial Board of Pediatrics, focusing on issues regarding uses for communications media in child health research. I have done content analyses of music videos for portrayals of health risk behaviors, I have developed interactive media-based health education and interventions, and I have developed a new research methodology, Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA), which is based on patients creating a video illness narrative of their lives with a medical condition which are then analyzed from medical, psycological, sociological, and anthropological perspectives.