Page 25 - Health Literacy, eHealth, and Communication: Putting the Consumer First: Workshop Summary

Health Literacy, eHealth, and Communication: Putting the Consumer First: Workshop Summary

0 HeALtH LiteRACY, eHeALtH, AnD CoMMUniCAtion

SkILLS ESSENTIAL FOR eHEALTH
Cameron D. norman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Public Health Sciences,
Uniersity of toronto

Since the 1960s and early 1970s there has been a shift from provider-
centered care to consumer-centered care, with individuals being encour-
aged to search for answers themselves and to take greater responsibility
for their own health. This has resulted in the growth of consumer-directed
material, such as self-help books and Internet websites.
Health information is known to be an essential component of health
behavior change. People must have information about the threat, the
opportunity, and the ability to make decisions about what actions to
take. With the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the public
now has access to the greatest information tool ever available, with indi-
viduals able to obtain a great deal of medical information on health at a
distance, without having to see a practitioner. So far, however, there are
no established guidelines for how to use the Internet or how to produce
content for it.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project (Fox, 2007) found that
more than 80 percent of Internet users report seeking health information
online; for Internet users with chronic conditions, the rate is 86 percent.
And those percentages will most likely increase over the coming years.
Unfortunately, few check the sources of information thoroughly and while
there is widespread availability of health resources online, a search engine
is usually the starting point. Thus, consumers need to have skills to effec-
tively seek out the desired information, evaluate it, and then apply the
information they find toward solving their health problems. More than
half (58 percent) of those who report searching for online health infor-
mation also report that the information they found affected their health
decisions, and 39 percent say the information they found changed the
way that they cope with a chronic condition or manage pain (Fox, 2006,
2007). Given these data, it is clear that it would be valuable to provide
individuals with skills essential for eHealth.
Robert Logan maintains that the Internet and networked tools for
health represent a fundamentally new form of language that requires
a new form of literacy (Logan, 2000). A quick search for information
on the common cold can be used to illustrate the difficulties in eHealth
literacy.
A search of WebMD (www.webmd.com) for information on the com-
mon cold produces a page with a great deal of text and advertisements for
a variety of products, not all of which are related to the health condition
described on the page. At the bottom of the text-heavy page is a list of

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