Delivering audience intelligence for diabetes education at scale
How ICF helped HHS gain continuous, transparent insights without the cost or constraints of direct research
More than 10% of the American population lives with diabetes, and more than 90% of those individuals have Type 2 diabetes. Reducing the disease’s impact on a population scale is a key priority for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—one that depends on understanding how to effectively reach and engage target audiences.
When direct audience research became unfeasible, HHS partnered with ICF to develop a low-cost, scalable approach to generating the insights needed to inform Type 2 diabetes education materials.
Challenge
High-quality educational materials help healthcare providers and patients manage Type 2 diabetes through treatment and lifestyle changes. But to be effective, those materials must be carefully crafted to resonate with their audiences.
When federal policy changes made direct research with providers and patients unfeasible, HHS needed an alternative way to generate the insights required to inform those materials.
- Data and analytics
- Cloud
Solution
We helped HHS design a secondary-data approach that draws on authoritative public sources, including the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), the American Community Survey, and CDC surveillance feeds.
The solution creates a continuously updated view of at-risk populations—going beyond demographics to include health care access and information environments.
A dashboard built in Google Looker Studio enables users to surface insights across 39 variables and trace them back to the original data sources, supporting transparency and trust.
Results
HHS now has continuous access to audience intelligence sourced entirely from vetted federal data—eliminating the need for direct research while maintaining transparency and traceability.
The solution is updated each time the underlying datasets run their updates, ensuring the platform can provide up-to-date insights that improve the relevance and timeliness of educational materials.
This approach is applicable to other public health priorities where audience intelligence is crucial but direct contact is restricted, time-sensitive, or cost-prohibitive. This model’s ability to leverage current data and incorporate new databases from other fields—such as transportation or energy—means it can quickly adapt, scale, and provide insights tailored to the unique needs of federal agencies.
