Abstract
Online Health Information Search: What Behavior for which Users? Towards a Typology of e-Patients
Highlights
Advances in Information and Communication Technologies in the health sector, the rapid progress in their use by the public, has opened up new perspectives (Beun, 2003; Ueckert et al, 2003; Eysenbach, 2003)
Diversity and abundance of online information and the emergence of new information producers led to changes in the information dissemination process itself and the appropriation of knowledge by patients
A survey conducted by HON indicates that 42% of healthcare professionals think that online consultation could decrease patients’ trust in their physicians, while 55% of the patients think the opposite
Summary
Advances in Information and Communication Technologies in the health sector, the rapid progress in their use by the public, has opened up new perspectives (Beun, 2003; Ueckert et al, 2003; Eysenbach, 2003). By facilitating access to health-related information, consultancies and services of all sorts, the Internet is growingly proving itself as one of the main tools of patients’ accountability (Erdem and Harrison-Walker, 2006). Patients seem to require being involved in taking decisions about the adopted treatments (Charles et al, 1999). They actively search for information about their health status and the most adequate treatments (Chalamon and Chouk, 2010). It became necessary to reposition the traditional services by reconsidering patients’ emerging behavior. To this end, this paper proposes to describe e-patients’ profiles referring to their online health-related
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