eHealth communication and behavior change: promise and performance

Abstract

Traditional health communication interventions have often failed to show significant changes in people's behaviors. Guidance from social semiotic frameworks suggests that health communication interventions can be improved by incorporating greater participation by the intended audiences of users, paying greater attention to social contexts, and increasing broad use of integrated multimedia dissemination strategies. The use of eHealth communication has great promise to influence behavioral health outcomes, given its enhanced features of interactivity, multimodality, mass customization, and the opportunity for users to also be producers. The first 15 years of scientific evidence about the use of eHealth interventions suggests that, overall, such strategies are gaining rapid acceptance worldwide, improve user engagement, and often show significant positive effects on health behaviors in diverse populations and across a wide range of health conditions. Challenges remain, however, to learn how to best use eHealth communication to improve information access for vulnerable populations, to effectively leverage the power of new media channels, and to discover the longer-term effects of eHealth communication on public health. This article reviews key issues and evidence from eHealth studies and recommends a greater application of strategic semiotic principles in future eHealth communication research and interventions.

Health communication inquiry and health outcomes

“…Health communication inquiry is typically problem-based, focused on explicating, examining, and addressing important and troubling health care and health promotion problems and issues. These issues often include difficulties in: promoting active coordination and collaboration in the delivery of health care, challenges in promoting adoption of health behaviors with at-risk populations, demands to reduce and ultimately eliminate inadvertent errors made that jeopardize the quality of health care, attempts to meet unmet health information needs for supporting informed health decision making, and the quest to overcome serious inequities in care that lead to health disparities and poor health outcomes (Kreps, 2011a;Neuhauser & Kreps, 2010). These are serious issues that demand attention from health communication scholars to help refine health promotion activities and improve health outcomes!…”

A user-centred approach to reducing sedentary behaviour

“…This is due to its enhanced features of interactivity, multimodality, mass customization, and the opportunity for users to also be producers [5]. In particular, reducing sedentary behaviour, utilizing these technologies has enormous potential.…”

Editors' Introduction: Ehealth and the Delivery of Health Care

“…These tools must be designed to effectively communicate the right information needed by different audiences at the right time, in the right place, and in the best ways to guide health care and health promotion. Evidence suggests that ehealth tools should be interactive, interoperable, easy to use, engaging, adaptable, and accessible for diverse audiences (Neuhauser & Kreps, 2010).This special issue of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication examines the strategic use of ehealth applications to enhance the delivery of health care. The ehealth interventions examined in this special issue are designed for diverse and vulnerable groups of health care consumers (such as patients coping with chronic health care problems, consumers who have low levels of health literacy, and members of marginalized populations who suffer from disparities in health outcomes), health care providers (both formal health professionals and informal caregivers/advocates), as well as health care system administrators and health policy makers.…”

“…These tools must be designed to effectively communicate the right information needed by different audiences at the right time, in the right place, and in the best ways to guide health care and health promotion. Evidence suggests that ehealth tools should be interactive, interoperable, easy to use, engaging, adaptable, and accessible for diverse audiences (Neuhauser & Kreps, 2010).…”

“…Ehealth applications, the use of new information technologies in health care and health promotion, have been developed as new tools for communicating with diverse audiences of health care consumers and providers. The growth of ehealth tools has spurred an information revolution within the modern health care system that hold tremendous promise for enhancing the delivery of care and the promotion of health (Neuhauser & Kreps, 2010). Yet, there is much to learn about the best ways to design and implement health information technologies.…”