Current Challenge in Consumer Health Informatics: Bridging the Gap between Access to Information and Information Understanding

Abstract

Abstract:The number of health-related websites has proliferated over the past few years. Health information consumers confront a myriad of health related resources on the internet that have varying levels of quality and are not always easy to comprehend. There is thus a need to help health information consumers to bridge the gap between access to information and information understanding-i.e. to help consumers understand health related web-based resources so that they can act upon it. At the same time health information consumers are becoming not only more involved in their own health care but also more information technology minded. One way to address this issue is to provide consumers with tailored information that is contextualized and personalized e.g. directly relevant and easily comprehensible to the person's own health situation. This paper presents a current trend in Consumer Health Informatics which focuses on theory-based design and development of contextualized and personalized tools to allow the evolving consumer with varying backgrounds and interests to use online health information effi ciently. The proposed approach uses a theoretical framework of communication in order to support the consumer's capacity to understand health-related web-based resources.

E-health Applications and Services for Patient Empowerment: Directions for Best Practices in The Netherlands

“…Work in this area (e.g., Refs. 3,19 ) may provide a sound basis for developing dedicated e-health applications and services and for understanding better the effects of patient empowerment and the conditions in which empowerment occurs.…”

ICT and the future of health care: aspects of health promotion

“…[18][19][20][21]. • Scenario 2 -Education: "Scientific, interactive multimedia is broadly accepted and intensively used for Public Health education and preventive medicine."…”

Do personalisation and emotions affect the use of cancer-related websites?

“…Previous studies explored personalisation on health-websites from specific perspectives, e.g. : defining personalisation requirements for Dutch senior citizens (Alpay et al, 2009); introducing personalised educational material on stroke-precaution for elderly in Taiwan (Hwang, 2011); analysing personalised educational health content for adolescents in the US (Cortese and Lustria, 2012); and, more recently, exploring the effect of personalised feedback on physical activities among adults from seven European countries (Marsaux et al, 2015). Nevertheless, the mentioned health websites and studies do not focus on cancer-affected people, and miss a wide range of personalisation features.…”

“…However, health-O n l i n e I n f o r m a t i o n R e v i e w consumers need to filter this wealth of often irrelevant (Alpay et al, 2009) and incomprehensible (Jucks and Bromme, 2007) content themselves, which is, possibly, overwhelming (Yocco, 2015). Disregarding the specific needs of cancer-affected users can trigger ending health-website visits.…”

“…To improve "website stickiness" (Benlian, 2015), personalisation can be introduced (Zaied et al, 2015, Topaloglu et al, 2013. However, research on a systematic application of personalisation features to health-websites is lacking (Cortese and Lustria, 2012, Fernandez-Luque et al, 2011, Alpay et al, 2009). This study analyses, therefore, the availability of personalisation on health websites, and personalisation needs of a specific target user group -people affected by cancer, in order to improve online cancer support.…”