The field of health communication today: an up-to-date report.

One important starting point for the field of health communication was the Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Program, a multiyear community intervention that began 25 years ago. Health communication is a specialty field of communication study that includes the media agenda-setting process for health issues; media advocacy for health; scientific communication among biomedical scientists; doctor-patient communication; and, particularly, the design and evaluation of preventive health communication campaigns, the focus of this article. Health communication study today is a well-established, expanding specialty in the United States and abroad.