Increasingly, healthcare consumers, including patients, families, and members of the public, seek health-related information for personal use. To meet consumer needs, organizations and individuals have produced a wealth of consumer health information. These resources are available in multiple media, including print, broadcast, and the Web. Whether the information is accessible to its intended audience or meets consumer needs is unclear, because of barriers such as technical jargon, literacy, and language (for non-English speakers).
The goal of this program is to conduct basic research in support of (1) consumer access to relevant health information and (2) understanding health information for personal needs. Lister Hill Center research and development systems such as ClinicalTrials.gov and the Genetics Home Reference not only integrate new and existing medical informatics techniques developed at the Center and elsewhere, but provide a test bed for assessing novel approaches. Such systems also allow for ongoing refinement based on "real-world" experience.
Other projects seek to study underlying user-oriented issues, including comprehensibility of health text for different lay audiences; access to health information by non-English speakers; understanding how laypersons express medical ideas; and metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of health communication to consumers. The results of these projects contribute to both the theory and practice of consumer health informatics.
For example, classical readability formulas, designed to help teachers select suitable texts for students, may not accurately reflect text difficulty outside the reading education domain. However, these formulas have other uses, such as assessing informed consent forms and health Web sites. The objective of this research is to seek better ways to match health materials with the literacy level and needs of consumers. Specifically, after identifying characteristics of health documents that affect how readers perceive the material, we intend to develop and validate tools to help assess consumer health materials using medical domain- and genre-specific linguistic factors.
As the population becomes more diverse, new approaches for making health information accessible to consumers are needed. This project explores different technologies for aiding non-English speakers in accessing consumer health information. We recently evaluated different approaches to cross-language information retrieval using Spanish-English machine translation in ClinicalTrials.gov. The feasibility of automating Spanish-language representations of ClinicalTrials.gov records is under investigation.
Mass media serve as the primary source of health and medical information for the public. Mass communication research addresses the different ways consumers interact with health materials. Our objective is to gain insights into how consumers build meaning from mass media presentation of health topics and issues. Eventually, such an understanding will help promote the diffusion of health information and improve health outcomes for the public.
Last updated: Thursday, 03-Jul-2003 10:23:44 EDT
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