Page 80 - Health Literacy, eHealth, and Communication: Putting the Consumer First: Workshop Summary

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

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patient hears in the physician’s office is completely forgotten by the time
he or she gets home (Eiser, 1982) When the patient returns home, he or she
will generally have numerous questions still unanswered. In response, the
patient goes to the Internet. The patient may also go to other places as
well in the search for information.
It is not difficult to find information on the Internet. The difficulty is
finding information relative to a specific need. Even if people find what
they need, they may not understand what they find. If they find and
understand the information, the next challenge is to remember it. If they
find, understand, and remember the information, they must then figure
out how to contextualize it, that is, they must determine what the infor-
mation means for their particular care and needs.
This is the task of information therapy; to figure out how to bring two
worlds together in order to make sure that the information people need
is there for them at the right time. Information therapy recognizes that
there is a difference between data and information. If one looks at a PHR,
for example, it may contain data that are hard to read and interpret. But
going from data to information therapy requires making sense of those
data and putting them into some context that leads to information, then
to knowledge, and ultimately, to behavior.
Appropriate use of HIT can help individuals make informed health
decisions. The Center for Information Therapy took part in a project that
observed how clinicians and patients use HIT to advance patient educa-
8
tion and to make better use of HIT tools. Time was spent in a wide vari-
ety of settings—small practices with one or two physicians, for example,
multi-specialty groups, and in integrated delivery systems. About half of
the time was spent in federally qualified community health centers.
Health literacy issues cut across various populations. One important
observation of the project was that some of the biggest health literacy
challenges occur with people who have significantly impaired cognitive
function, such as people with mental illness.
If one is to understand what actually happens with patients, one
must spend time on site. For that reason, project staff spent a great deal
of time observing the interactions of clinicians and patients. But before
they observed these clinician/patient interactions, the project staff spoke
with administrators of the facilities. One finding was that the way in
which administrators viewed things was often contradicted by what

8 Safety net providers observed included the Institute for Family Health (New York);
East Boston Neighborhood Health Center; Cambridge Health Alliance (Massachusetts); La
Clinica de La Raza (California); District of Columbia Primary Care Association; Lifelong
Medical Care (California); Queens Health Network (New York); UNITE HERE! (New York);
Urban Health Plan (New York); Baltimore Medical System; Redwood Community Health
Coalition; and MiVia/La Luz Community Center (California).

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