Effects of episodic variations in web-based avian influenza education: influence of fear and humor on perception, comprehension, retention and behavior.
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Rising expectations: access to biomedical information.
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OBJECTIVE: To provide an overview of the expansion in public access to electronic biomedical information over the past two decades, with an emphasis on developments to which the U.S. National Library of Medicine contributed. METHODS: Review of the increasingly broad spectrum of web-accessible genomic data, biomedical literature, consumer health information, clinical trials data, and images. RESULTS: The amount of publicly available electronic biomedical information has increased dramatically over the past twenty years. Rising expectations regarding access to biomedical information were stimulated by the spread of the Internet, the World Wide Web, advanced searching and linking techniques. These informatics advances simplified and improved access to electronic information and reduced costs, which enabled inter-organizational collaborations to build and maintain large international information resources and also aided outreach and education efforts The demonstrated benefits of free access to electronic biomedical information encouraged the development of public policies that further increase the amount of information available. CONCLUSIONS: Continuing rapid growth of publicly accessible electronic biomedical information presents tremendous opportunities and challenges, including the need to ensure uninterrupted access during disasters or emergencies and to manage digital resources so they remain available for future generations. (+info)
Knowledge of diabetic eye disease and vision care guidelines among Hispanic individuals in Baltimore with and without diabetes.
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Beyond surface characteristics: a new health text-specific readability measurement.
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Accurate readability assessment of health related materials is a critical first step in producing easily understandable consumer health information resources and personal health records. Existing general readability formulas may not always be appropriate for the medical/consumer health domain. We developed a new health-specific readability pilot measure, based on the differences in semantic and syntactic features as well as text unit length. The tool was tested with 4 types of materials: consumer health texts, electronic health records, health news articles, and scientific biomedical journals. The results were compared with those produced by three commonly used general readability formulas. While the general formulas underestimated the difficulty of health records by placing them at the same grade levels as consumer health texts, our method rated health records as the most difficult type of documents. Our ratings, however, were highly correlated with general formulas ratings of consumer health, news, and journal articles (r=0.81 approximately 0.85, p<.0001). (+info)
Digital partnerships for health: steps to develop a community-specific health portal aimed at promoting health and well-being.
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We describe the steps taken by the Harlem Health Promotion Center to develop a community-specific health web portal aimed at promoting health and well-being in Harlem. Methods and results that begin with data collection and move onto elucidating requirements for the web portal are discussed. Sentiments of distrust in medical institutions, and the desire for community specific content and resources were among the needs emanating from our data analysis. These findings guided our decision to customize social software designed to foster connections, collaborations, flexibility, and interactivity; an "architecture of participation". While, we maintain that the leveraging of social software may indeed be the way to build healthy communities and support learning and engagement in underserved communities, our conclusion calls for careful thinking, testing and evaluation research to establish best practice models for leveraging these emerging technologies to support health improvements in the community. (+info)
ActiveOptions: leveraging existing knowledge and usability testing to develop a physical activity program website for older adults.
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ActiveOptions (http://www.activeoptions.org) is a multi-agency effort to help people remain healthy as they age by providing Web access to information about senior-friendly exercise programs. This resource is currently available and in use in many location across the United States. This paper focuses on the user interface to the site. It synthesizes existing knowledge related to creating an effective interface for this population, and describes the process we used which included a heuristic evaluation and usability testing. (+info)