Introduction:

Positive and negative interactions between the human beings and the environment have an impact on the general health of the population. Therefore, it is necessary to use knowledge management and social transformation, in order to limit exposure to environmental risk factors by creating a favorable environment for healthcare. This should be carried out through multidisciplinary and intersectorial actions, such as the collaborative work of knowledge networks.

Objective:

To describe the interactions between the actors within the Environmental Health Knowledge Network Colombia's National Observatory of Health (ONS acronym in Spanish), in order to promote, improve and strengthen collaboration, information exchange and planning of collaborative actions.

Methodology:

Cross-sectional descriptive study to analyze social interactions through text mining tools by R, programmer language. Categories analyzed: Water and sanitation, climate, air quality, electromagnetic radiation and chemical poisoning. Data source: a documentary corpus of 99 texts done by actors of Environmental Health Knowledge Network of Colombia's ONS. We calculated centrality and prestige measures. We used Power BI in order to plot multi-layered directed networks.

Results:

Actors with greatest centrality in the network: Ministry of Health and Social Protection, Health Superintendency, Profamilia, Antioquia and La Salle universities, National Health Observatory, Bogota's Observatory of Environmental Health, the Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization. The five categories analyzed provides a low centrality degree, and water and climate categories presented greater participation by actors (more nodes and links).

Conclusions:

Social interactions analysis provides the identification of relevant environmental health issues in Colombia and key actors in order to develop interaction spaces for knowledge management. The analysis had limitations that suggest the inclusion of bibliometric approaches for updating the interactions within the network.