How, When and Why People Seek Health Information Online: Qualitative Study in Hong Kong

Chu, Jian-Hong; Wang, Man Ping; Shen, Chen; Viswanath, Kasisomayajula; Lam, Tai Hing; Chan, Sophia Siu Chee

doi:10.2196/ijmr.7000

Cited by 126 publications

(105 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…(see Tables 6-8 in Additional files 1, 2, 3). Five studies had taken place in the United Kingdom [27][28][29][30][31], six from the United States [32][33][34][35][36][37], two from Canada [38,39], one from Austria [40], four from Israel [41][42][43][44], two from Australia [45,46], three from Switzerland [47][48][49], one from Portugal [50] and one from China [51]. The sample sizes ranged from 11 to 975 with participants including patients either posting online or attending primary care clinics, carers, physicians such as GP's, nurses and various other HCP's.…”

Section: Study Characteristicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A mixed methods systematic review of the effects of patient online self-diagnosing in the ‘smart-phone society’ on the healthcare professional-patient relationship and medical authority

Farnood

Johnston

Mair

2020

BMC Med Inform Decis Mak

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Background As technology continues to advance, the internet is becoming increasingly popular. Self-diagnosis and health information seeking online is growing more common and it will be important to understand the influence this may have on the patient-healthcare professional relationship. Methods A mixed-method systematic review of quantitative, qualitative and mixed method studies concerning the public and healthcare professionals’ perceptions of online self-diagnosis and health information seeking and how this can impact the patient-healthcare professional relationship. We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, ACM & SCOPUS between 2007 and 2018. Relevant data were extracted, and a thematic analysis was conducted and conceptualised using the Normalisation Process Theory framework. Results Of 6107 records identified, 25 articles met the review eligibility criteria which included 16 qualitative, 8 quantitative and 1 mixed method study. The findings indicated that patients found the internet as a complementary information source alongside healthcare professionals. Health care professionals were perceived to be the most reliable and valued information source. People feel responsible for their own health and find the internet to be a source that provides information rapidly with accessibility at their convenience. Most healthcare professionals agreed on the importance of collaboration with patients and the need to develop a partnership and shared decision-making process but struggled to find time in the consultation to do so efficiently. Some healthcare professionals felt that the internet was advantageous for patients looking after their own health, while others felt it was due to a lack of trust in their expertise. Patients tended to present information to the healthcare professional to support the therapeutic relationship rather than to challenge it and to become more involved in the decision-making process of their healthcare. Conclusion The results of this review suggests that patients value healthcare professionals as a source of medical advice more than the internet. While health professionals’ views were mixed our findings indicate that online health information seeking can potentially improve the patient-healthcare professional relationship as patients reported they usually conducted an online search to form a partnership with the healthcare professional as opposed to trying to prove them wrong.

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Section: Study Characteristicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I think this is really convenient and because it's the Internet, it offers you more sources and opinions." [51].…”

Section: Activation Contextual Integration Reconfigurationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A mixed methods systematic review of the effects of patient online self-diagnosing in the ‘smart-phone society’ on the healthcare professional-patient relationship and medical authority

Farnood

Johnston

Mair

2020

BMC Med Inform Decis Mak

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“…More generally, it has been estimated that between 70% and 90% of health care is undertaken by individuals without the involvement of health care professionals [ 7 , 8 ]. This would suggest that before seeking treatment from health care professionals, people will first try to treat their problems themselves, with search engines as the most common approach [ 7 - 11 ]. The most popular search engine in the world, Google [ 12 ], had a market share of 96% in Finland in 2016 [ 13 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diurnal Variations of Depression-Related Health Information Seeking: Case Study in Finland Using Google Trends Data

et al. 2018

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BackgroundSome of the temporal variations and clock-like rhythms that govern several different health-related behaviors can be traced in near real-time with the help of search engine data. This is especially useful when studying phenomena where little or no traditional data exist. One specific area where traditional data are incomplete is the study of diurnal mood variations, or daily changes in individuals’ overall mood state in relation to depression-like symptoms.ObjectiveThe objective of this exploratory study was to analyze diurnal variations for interest in depression on the Web to discover hourly patterns of depression interest and help seeking.MethodsHourly query volume data for 6 depression-related queries in Finland were downloaded from Google Trends in March 2017. A continuous wavelet transform (CWT) was applied to the hourly data to focus on the diurnal variation. Longer term trends and noise were also eliminated from the data to extract the diurnal variation for each query term. An analysis of variance was conducted to determine the statistical differences between the distributions of each hour. Data were also trichotomized and analyzed in 3 time blocks to make comparisons between different time periods during the day.ResultsSearch volumes for all depression-related query terms showed a unimodal regular pattern during the 24 hours of the day. All queries feature clear peaks during the nighttime hours around 11 PM to 4 AM and troughs between 5 AM and 10 PM. In the means of the CWT-reconstructed data, the differences in nighttime and daytime interest are evident, with a difference of 37.3 percentage points (pp) for the term “Depression,” 33.5 pp for “Masennustesti,” 30.6 pp for “Masennus,” 12.8 pp for “Depression test,” 12.0 pp for “Masennus testi,” and 11.8 pp for “Masennus oireet.” The trichotomization showed peaks in the first time block (00.00 AM-7.59 AM) for all 6 terms. The search volumes then decreased significantly during the second time block (8.00 AM-3.59 PM) for the terms “Masennus oireet” (P<.001), “Masennus” (P=.001), “Depression” (P=.005), and “Depression test” (P=.004). Higher search volumes for the terms “Masennus” (P=.14), “Masennustesti” (P=.07), and “Depression test” (P=.10) were present between the second and third time blocks.ConclusionsHelp seeking for depression has clear diurnal patterns, with significant rise in depression-related query volumes toward the evening and night. Thus, search engine query data support the notion of the evening-worse pattern in diurnal mood variation. Information on the timely nature of depression-related interest on an hourly level could improve the chances for early intervention, which is beneficial for positive health outcomes.

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“…Google and Wikipedia, e.g. are used for everyday life research [HE09] and, in particular, health information [CWS*17, GKN*05, KH18, RMSS15, SWR08, Yan10]. A young audience often uses them to inform themselves [FCBS18, SBPG03, GKN*05, SWR08] or work on school projects [BCAL15, She18]—yet they can contain graphic or inappropriate content [LSG*18, LKPS14, Wik03, Wik10b].…”

Section: Arkangel: a Chrome Extensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reducing Affective Responses to Surgical Images and Videos Through Stylization

Besançon

Semmo

Biau

et al. 2019

Computer Graphics Forum

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We present the first empirical study on using colour manipulation and stylization to make surgery images/videos more palatable. While aversion to such material is natural, it limits many people's ability to satisfy their curiosity, educate themselves and make informed decisions. We selected a diverse set of image processing techniques to test them both on surgeons and lay people. While colour manipulation techniques and many artistic methods were found unusable by surgeons, edge‐preserving image smoothing yielded good results both for preserving information (as judged by surgeons) and reducing repulsiveness (as judged by lay people). We then conducted a second set of interview with surgeons to assess whether these methods could also be used on videos and derive good default parameters for information preservation. We provide extensive supplemental material at https://osf.io/4pfes/.

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How, When and Why People Seek Health Information Online: Qualitative Study in Hong Kong

Cited by 126 publications

References 29 publications

A mixed methods systematic review of the effects of patient online self-diagnosing in the ‘smart-phone society’ on the healthcare professional-patient relationship and medical authority

A mixed methods systematic review of the effects of patient online self-diagnosing in the ‘smart-phone society’ on the healthcare professional-patient relationship and medical authority

Diurnal Variations of Depression-Related Health Information Seeking: Case Study in Finland Using Google Trends Data

Reducing Affective Responses to Surgical Images and Videos Through Stylization

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