Pediatricians Turn Online Health Misinformation Into Targeted Patient Education

Health misinformation has become one of the most persistent challenges in modern medicine, and nowhere is its impact felt more acutely than in pediatric care, where anxious parents routinely arrive at appointments carrying questions shaped by viral posts, online forums, and social media influencers. New research presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics 2026 National Conference and Exhibition, held October 2 through 6 at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, suggests that the misinformation itself can be turned into an asset. By systematically tracking the false or misleading claims that clinicians hear from patients, researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia have shown that hospitals can identify exactly what families are worried about and respond with targeted, science-based educational content in near real time.

The study, presented under the title Tracking Pediatric Health Misinformation Clinicians Hear to Build an Institutional Response, describes a practical surveillance system built inside a large pediatric hospital. Rather than treating each misinformation encounter as an isolated event to be corrected on the spot, the CHOP team created a structured way to log those encounters, aggregate them, and analyze the patterns that emerged. The result is a feedback loop in which the questions and doubts voiced in exam rooms directly shape the educational materials the institution produces for patients, families, and its own clinicians.

The technical backbone of the system is a survey tracking tool built on REDCap, a widely used electronic data capture platform in academic medical research. The survey was distributed across CHOP clinical environments through fliers, emails, and a link embedded directly in the hospital’s electronic health record system, Epic, making it easy for busy clinicians to report misinformation they encountered during routine care. Respondents were asked what misinformation they had heard, which category it fit into, whether they felt prepared to address it, what strategies they used, and whether or not their approach worked, along with additional demographic questions about the respondent.

To make the collected data actionable, the researchers paired the survey with a Qliksense dashboard that provides real-time insights into survey entries. A multidisciplinary team, including a pediatrician, a neonatologist, public relations and marketing specialists, a data analyst, and a journalist, meets monthly to review the trending topics and decide which ones warrant new patient education content or internal clinician training. This combination of lightweight data collection, live analytics, and regular cross-disciplinary review is what transforms scattered anecdotes into an institutional response capable of keeping pace with rapidly shifting misinformation trends.

Between May 2025 and March 2026, the tracking tool recorded 234 entries from clinicians across the hospital. The single largest category was vaccine misinformation, which accounted for 53.8 percent of all entries, confirming that immunization remains the dominant battleground for pediatric health myths. Trending keywords included aluminum, acetaminophen, ADHD, and antibiotics, reflecting the specific concerns circulating in the community the hospital serves. Beyond vaccines, the topics ranged across categories such as distrust in healthcare, supplements, miracle cures, and unnecessary interventions, illustrating how broad and varied the misinformation landscape confronting pediatric clinicians has become.

The survey also yielded revealing data about how prepared clinicians feel when confronting misinformation, and how effective they actually are. On a scale of 1 to 100, respondents reported a median preparedness score of 77 in responding to misinformation from patients. Yet only 28 percent reported that their approach actually worked in changing a patient’s or family’s perspective. That gap between confidence and effectiveness is one of the study’s most striking findings, and it underscores a problem familiar to communication researchers: simply knowing the science is often not enough to counter a belief that is emotionally or socially anchored.

Experience, interestingly, cut in both directions. Median preparedness scores increased with years of practice, suggesting that seasoned clinicians feel more comfortable engaging with misinformation. However, more years in practice was associated with lower chances that their approach actually worked. The findings hint that the communication techniques that come naturally to experienced physicians may not be the ones best suited to changing minds, and that formal training in misinformation response could benefit clinicians at every career stage. It was precisely this kind of insight that informed the internal education initiatives the hospital subsequently developed.

The practical output of the tracking system has been substantial. The entries have driven the creation of new patient education and public health social media content on 28 topics, including videos and blog posts, along with seven corresponding opinion editorials published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The external-facing component is a website called Pediatric Health Chat, which contains educational information specifically designed to debunk the misinformation families reported encountering in their everyday lives. In addition, the team launched a weekly educational email on vaccine communication skills, which has run for ten weeks and counting of clinician education content informed directly by the REDCap entries.

Katie Lockwood, MD, MEd, FAAP, study author and pediatrician at CHOP, framed the approach as a way of listening to families more systematically. Looking at these trends allowed the team to see in real time what was worrying the families they care for and to give them the most up-to-date science on topics of interest, she said. Addressing pediatric health misinformation is vital to protecting the health of children, she added, and as trusted messengers, children’s hospitals have an obligation to respond. The research showed that systematically tracking the misinformation families encounter can turn clinicians’ real-world questions into effective, targeted education, even when individual corrective conversations fall short.

The implications extend well beyond a single institution. Although fewer than one-third of survey respondents said their own responses worked, the aggregated findings gave providers a clearer understanding of families’ concerns and helped guide materials for patients, families, and other clinicians. The researchers state that the approach could be replicated in other hospitals and care settings to help build trust with patients and caregivers and provide them the information they need most to keep children healthy. In an era when misinformation spreads faster than any press release, the CHOP model offers a template for meeting families where their worries actually are, using the clinical encounter itself as a sensor for the information environment surrounding children’s health.

Subject of Research: Tracking pediatric health misinformation in clinical encounters to build institutional patient education responses

Article Title: Monitoring online health misinformation can help create useful patient education content

Article References: Monitoring online health misinformation can help create useful patient education content. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: health misinformation, pediatrics, vaccine misinformation, patient education, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, American Academy of Pediatrics, clinical communication, REDCap, clinician training, public health messaging, social media, Pediatric Health Chat