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Submitted on February 1, 2008
Accepted on April 5, 2008
Affiliation of the authors: 1 Division of Specialized Information Services, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD; Aquilent, Inc., Laurel, MD ; 2 Office of Communications and Public Liaison, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD ; 3 School of Library and Information Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI ; 4 School of Information Systems and Technology, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA ; 5 Decision Systems Group, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
As the emphasis on individuals' active partnership in healthcare grows, so does the public's need for effective, comprehensible consumer health resources. Consumer health informatics has the potential to provide frameworks and strategies for designing effective health communication tools that empower users and improve their health decisions. This white paper presents an overview of the consumer health informatics field, discusses promising approaches to supporting health communication, and identifies challenges plus direction for future research and development. The authors' recommendations emphasize the need for drawing upon communication and social science theories of information behavior, reaching out to consumers via a range of traditional and novel formats, gaining better understanding of the public's health information needs and developing informatics solutions for tailoring resources to users' needs and competencies. This paper was written as a scholarly outreach and leadership project by members of AMIA's Consumer Health Informatics Working Group.
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