Consumer Health Information Services Research Articles

Impact of a consumer health information specialization (CHIS) sponsorship program on the ability of public library staff to provide consumer health information.

Objective:In 2018, the Network of the National Libraries of Medicine (NNLM) launched a sponsorship program to support public library staff in completing the Medical Library Association's Consumer Health Information Specialization (CHIS). The objectives of our study were to: (1) determine whether completion of the sponsored specialization improved ability to provide consumer health information; (2) identify new health information services, programming, and outreach activities at public libraries; (3) investigate benefits of the specialization; and (4) determine the impact of sponsorship on obtaining and continuing the specialization.Methods:We used REDCap to administer a 16-question survey in August 2019 to 224 public library staff who were sponsored during the first year of the program. We measured competence in providing consumer health information aligned with the eight Core Competencies for Providing Consumer Health Information Services [1] as well as new activities at public libraries, benefits of the specialization to public library staff, career gains, and the likelihood of continuing the specialization based on funding.Results:More than 80% of 136 participants reported an increase in core consumer health competencies, with a statistically significant improvement in mean competency scores after completing the specialization. Ninety percent of participants have continued their engagement with NNLM, and more than half offered new health information programs and services. While more than half planned to renew the specialization or obtain the Level II specialization, 72% indicated they would not continue without NNLM sponsorship.Conclusions:Findings indicate that NNLM sponsorship of the CHIS specialization was successful in increasing the capacity of public library staff to provide health information to their communities.

COVID-19 Patient Education and Consumer Health Information Resources and Services

The health information needs of providers, patients, and consumers are continually evolving in response to the spread of COVID-19. Information professionals play key roles in counteracting the associated dangerous impact of misinformation, the digital divide, low health literacy, and information overload. Librarians can contribute to the fight against COVID-19 through collating reliable, up-to-date, and inclusive resources; triaging evidence; creating “stop-gap” collections; promoting credible sources; and through health literacy training. This column therefore focuses on pandemic information services for patient education and consumer health, while also discussing librarians’ dual roles as information providers and community advocates during the time of COVID-19.

Relationship between Patients’ Access to Health Information and Coping with Chronic Disease

The research examined the association between patients’ demographics, access to health information on coping and self-efficacy in managing chronic illness. This is a correlation study. The population for this study is seven hundred and eighty-four patients with chronic diseases in two Federal Government Teaching Hospitals in South-East, Nigeria. A Questionnaire and a Coping with Chronic Diseases Self-Efficacy Scale were instruments for data collection. Correlation analysis shows that access to coping information was positively and significantly correlated with self-efficacy in managing chronic diseases. Multiple Regression suggests that disease type was the only patient characteristics significantly associated with self-efficacy when patients have access to coping information. The study conclude that the significant associations indicate that health information can enable patients develop self-efficacy for coping with chronic diseases. Hospital administrators and all stakeholders involved in health care should create an enabling environment for information sharing and flow to patients with chronic diseases. Librarians should play some roles in creating access to health information for patients with chronic diseases through developing and promoting consumer health information resources.Keywords: Health information, Coping; Self-efficacy, Chronic diseases; Self- management; Consumer health information service

Identification of patients' rights to benefit from consumer health information services: A Delphi study.

INTRODUCTION:Patients have different rights, one of which is their right to access health information. The aim of this study was to identify patients’ rights to benefit from consumer health information services using a qualitative method.MATERIALS AND METHODS:The research method was qualitative using a Delphi technique. The statistical population consisted of 12 specialists in the field of medical library and information science and researchers and healthcare professionals. Eight dimensions and 42 items of patients’ rights were identified and were approved by Delphi panel.RESULTS:Regarding patients’ rights to benefit from consumer health information services, eight dimensions including the right to health knowledge, the right to access to health information, the professional behavior of medical librarians with patients, content richness, information seeking skills, awareness of new services and products, the ease of using health information centers, and the professional behavior of healthcare professionals with patients were identified and approved.CONCLUSION:Decreasing the gap between the health literacy of healthcare professionals and patients is one of the duties of medical librarians and health information professionals. Establishing of patient rights in the area of utilizing health information services is an important step in improving the quality of services received by patients.

Piloting Consumer Health Information Services in Collaboration with a Community Research Engagement Program

ABSTRACTAt an academic health science center, librarians partnered with a community research engagement program to offer a suite of consumer health information services. The services included training staff in the use of online consumer health resources, purchasing a print collection of monographs, and creating a guide to both the online and print resources for staff use. Focus groups were conducted to assess information needs, and the workshop attendees’ online health information competency was assessed presession and postsession. This article details planning and intervention efforts, and proposes future activities to meet the information needs of HealthStreet and its clients.

"Take an opportunity whenever you get it": Information Sharing among African-American Women with Hypertension.

Nearly half of African-American women have hypertension, which increases their risk for cardiovascular disease and stroke. A plethora of consumer health information products and services exist to inform people with hypertension and to promote self-management among them. Promotion of information sharing by African-American women represents a promising, culturally-applicable strategy for consumer health information services focused on hypertension self-management. Yet, how African-American women share hypertension information with others is unclear. The purpose of this qualitative, descriptive study was to examine practices of information sharing in African-American women with hypertension. Thirteen women (mean age = 73, SD = 9.87) participated in one of two focus groups held at an urban community health center. Thematic analysis revealed that the women shared information about how they self-managed their blood pressure 1) with female family members and friends, 2) about ways in which they adapted self-management strategies to work for them, 3) mostly in group settings, and 4) because they wanted to prevent others from suffering and reinforce their own knowledge about hypertension self-management. New findings emerged regarding assessing "readiness" for information. Study findings will be used to inform the design of an information sharing intervention to support self-management of hypertension in African-American women.

Collaboration, Visibility, and Relationship Marketing: Driving Use and Demonstrating Value of a Consumer Health Information Service

ABSTRACTPreston Medical Library/Health Information Center partnered with the University of Tennessee Medical Center Marketing and an outside marketing firm to better promote patient and community engagement in health information. An internal and external marketing plan was developed to promote the library through the development of brochures, table tents, room signage, television appearances and other various marketing strategies. Working with both marketing teams has created a unique opportunity to broaden internal promotion of the library. In addition, the relationship developed between the library and the marketing teams has expanded the library’s presence in the community and created an increase in community use.

Consumer Health Education Center: An Overview of Library Services

ABSTRACTThis paper provides a brief review of the development and history of the Community Health Education Center (CHEC), a library for patients and their family members over its past 14 years. Over time, CHEC management recognized new patient needs and evolved to meet the needs of its users through a variety of value-added services. This article discusses current services that CHEC offers including reference, business services, and health and wellness programs. Libraries planning to provide consumer health information services to patients and their family members can learn valuable lessons from the history, development, challenges, and services of CHEC.

“Information Prescription” Orders in the Electronic Medical Record at UVA: Bringing our Consumer Health Information Service to the Bedside and Planning for Outcomes Research

For hospital-based and hospital-embedded librarians, just as for all other librarians, aligning with our organization’s overarching goals, mission, vision, and values is vital (1). The questions we...

Consumer Health Information Services and Programs: Best Practices

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Hispanics and public libraries

Purpose The fastest-growing and the largest minority group in the USA, Hispanics are known to have low health literacy because of their limited English proficiency (LEP) and other socio-economic and cultural factors. This paper aims to examine the health information-seeking behaviors of Hispanics in the e-health environment and their use of public libraries as a health information source/service. Design/methodology/approach An interviewer-administered survey was conducted using a semi-structured instrument. The questionnaires inquired about Hispanics’ health information needs, source use and source preference; use of the library for health information needs; and their perceptions and satisfaction about the library’s consumer health information services. A total of 26 Hispanics were recruited from a Hispanic community organization, a public library and an ethnic grocery store in North Carolina. Findings The majority of the participants are foreign born (92.3 per cent) and non-English speakers (84.6 per cent). The internet was the most frequently used source, followed by friends/family, doctors and TV. Eighty-one per cent of the participants were internet users, and most of them (71 per cent) used the internet at home. Only 23 per cent visited a public library to search the internet for health information. Some barriers to using a public library mentioned by the participants include lack of time to visit a library, lack of skills in using the library materials, transportation, LEP, lack of eligibility for a library card, etc. Social implications The findings will be useful for libraries and state/federal health services to evaluate and develop library services suitable for the Hispanics’ consumer health information needs. Originality/value This study is one of a few studies that use an empirical study of a low health literacy ethnic population to examine the possible roles of public libraries in enhancing health literacy.

A Mini Review of Patients Access to Health Information in China

The purpose of this review is to briefly examine published articles regarding patients’ access to health information in China. The searching was performed on the PubMed using MeSH words such as “consumer health information, health literacy, health education and drug information service”. After preliminary screen, the contents were categorized as present situation, obstacles and future perspectives. In conclusion, patients now rely more on alternative access to health information to complement doctor consultation. Traditional alternative sources suffer low timeliness, credibility and efficiency. Though the current boom of online health information is promising, low quality of information, unequal access and poor design features have become obstacles for further development. In the future, Chinese authority and professional institutions will support the construction of search websites able to provide authentic health information. Training programs of health literacy will be employed universally, and pharmacist counselling will be well received.

SimQ: real-time retrieval of similar consumer health questions.

BackgroundThere has been a significant increase in the popularity of Web-based question-and-answer (Q&A) services that provide health care information for consumers. Large amounts of Q&As have been archived in these online communities, which form a valuable knowledge base for consumers who seek answers to their health care concerns. However, due to consumers’ possible lack of professional knowledge, it is still very challenging for them to find Q&As that are closely relevant to their own health problems. Consumers often repeatedly ask similar questions that have already been answered previously by other users.ObjectiveIn this study, we aim to develop efficient informatics methods that can retrieve similar Web-based consumer health questions using syntactic and semantic analysis.MethodsWe propose the “SimQ” to achieve this objective. SimQ is an informatics framework that compares the similarity of archived health questions and retrieves answers to satisfy consumers’ information needs. Statistical syntactic parsing was used to analyze each question’s syntactic structure. Standardized Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) was employed to annotate semantic types and extract medical concepts. Finally, the similarity between sentences was calculated using both semantic and syntactic features.ResultsWe used 2000 randomly selected consumer questions to evaluate the system’s performance. The results show that SimQ reached the highest precision of 72.2%, recall of 78.0%, and F-score of 75.0% when using compositional feature representations.ConclusionsWe demonstrated that SimQ complements the existing Q&A services of Netwellness, a not-for-profit community-based consumer health information service that consists of nearly 70,000 Q&As and serves over 3 million users each year. SimQ not only reduces response delay by instantly providing closely related questions and answers, but also helps consumers to improve the understanding of their health concerns.

Consumer Health Information Centers in Medical Libraries: A Survey of Current Practices

This article summarizes a survey designed to assess consumer health information services in United States medical libraries and describes how survey data informed the planning process for redesigning a medical library. The survey included multiple choice and ranking questions about staffing, space, services, and resources. Identifying characteristics of existing consumer health information services may be useful for libraries implementing or expanding such a service. The importance of patient education is acknowledged through recent research, Joint Commission, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Records requirement for patient education. Hospital libraries can play a key role in this domain.

Consumer Health Information Column

Some thoughts about the current situation for consumer health information in Canada . . . Although I officially moved to a position at McGill University in August 2009 (previously I was the manager of the Consumer Health Information Service based at the Toronto Public Library), consumer health information (CHI) is still very much on my mind. In fact, the Life Sciences Library here has a CHI collection that is well used despite our location up the hill. Consumer health information is an important and rewarding area for a librarian often in a team with other professionals and volunteers to be working in, but I am concerned about the lack of support from Canadian government officials [who feel that consumers can easily access quality health information on the Internet] and many Canadian health organizations. A number of CHI centres have closed or are fighting for their existence. On the bright side, St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto opened a Patient and Family Learning Centre this summer (http://www.stmichaelshospital.com/learn/patientfamily-learning-centre.php). I would encourage anyone working in CHI to join the Consumer Health Information Providers Interest Group (CHIPIG), an affiliate of CHLA/ABSC (http://www.chlaabsc.ca/chipig/). Although CHIPIG began as a group of CHI librarians in the Toronto-Hamilton area, its membership is now Canada-wide. They have in-person meetings several times a year, and distant members can join in on meetings virtually. There is a list of the top 10 Canadian consumer health websites from 2010 (http://www.chlaabsc.ca/chipig/top-ten-2010.html), which will hopefully be reviewed and updated regularly. At past CHLA meetings, CHIPIG members have presented posters on topics such as health literacy. Another resource is the wiki (http://chis.wikidot.com/ start) that the Consumer Health Information Service (CHIS) began and kept up to date until May 2009: it includes some content added by the staff of the Business, Science and Technology department of the Toronto Public Library (TPL). ‘‘Locating Reliable Health Information on the Internet’’, a course developed by CHIS, continues, and you can find tips on where to search for information, and evaluate the sites (Note: the most recent course dates can be found on the main TPL site). There’s a link from the TPL page to the Health and Wellness blog (http:// torontopubliclibrary.typepad.com/health-and-wellness/)where you will find short articles on health topics with lists of related resources, mentions of special health dates, and dates for upcoming talks at TPL. In the U.S., there is continuing support for consumer health information, and sites such as MedlinePlus (http:// www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/) have expanded in response to user need. MedlinePlus now features over 900 health topic pages (many of these are also available in Spanish), information from over 1 000 organizations, and over 35 000 links to authoritative health information. You can even find a list organized by state of consumer health libraries’ services for local residents. While we had the Canadian Health Network (CHN) web site in Canada until March 2008 CHN was a national, bilingual health promotion service operated by the Public Health Agency of Canada and major health organizations across Canada it never had the wealth of information found on MedlinePlus. Currently, there is no ‘‘one-stop-shopping’’ site in Canada for consumer health information. However, there is CHIPIG’s list of the top 10 Canadian consumer health websites; these are specialty sites organized by topic. Yes, there is the Healthy Canadians site (http://www. healthycanadians.gc.ca/index-eng.php), but as of December 2011, the most recent update was June 2011, and it doesn’t provide enough information for consumers to make informed health care decisions. In the area of support for consumer health information, Canadian consumers have been the losers. When you have an opportunity to advocate for the provision of CHI in your institution or to the Government, please do so!

Understanding the librarian/user gap in perception of health information services: A phenomenographic approach

The study aimed to illuminate different perspectives between public library users and librarians in perceiving the major challenges for consumer health information services and suggest how to reduce the gap between them. The study employed phenomenography, a qualitative approach, and conducted semi-structured intensive interviews with 40 public library users and 20 reference librarians at 12 public libraries in Florida and Maryland. Findings identified gaps between user needs and the assistance that librarians provide for them. Privacy issues affect the types of health information resources users prefer, where budget constraints influence the ones on which librarians focus. While traditional reference interviews stress clear communication between users and librarians, the present study underscores that non-verbal communication is crucial in helping users protect their privacy. Understanding the different perspectives of consumer health information services can provide insights for design and evaluation strategies of such service, and training and education of librarians and users.

Knowledge Gaps Among Public Librarians Seeking Vaccination Information: A Qualitative Study

Public libraries have been called the “first responders” to the specialized health information needs of the general public. The challenges inherent in consumer health information (CHI) service are centered around the Patron, the Librarian, the Information Resources, and the Library itself. The pilot study involved interviews with nine individual library workers in eight public libraries in four library systems: the District of Columbia, Montgomery and Prince George's Counties in Maryland, and Fairfax County in Virginia. Library workers were asked about common consumer health information requests, the nature of their collections, and the role of public libraries in meeting these information needs. The subjects were also presented with a hypothetical scenario, and their responses suggest knowledge gaps. The findings point to the increasing necessity and importance of training and support for public librarians, as well as the importance of understanding where the medical knowledge gaps exist. Public librarians need to commit to formal evaluation of their skill sets and knowledge gaps, in order to identify areas to which libraries can devote limited resources.

The Development and Performance Measurements of Educational Programs to Improve Consumer Health Information (CHI) Literacy

This research aimed to develop an education program for public librarians and library users and to measure the effectiveness of this program to promote Consumer Health Information (CHI) service programs in libraries. This study provided CHI education for librarians and users and then examined how the education program affected their perception of CHI. After developing the education program, the author analyzed the change in perception, knowledge, and satisfaction of CHI in users and librarians before and after the program was administered. The author observed improvement in familiarity with CHI terminologies, knowledge of health-related websites and information sources, and ability to find health-related information on the Internet in both librarian and users groups. The research also revealed librarians’ difficulty in providing CHI reference service and a possible solution: including education on CHI in the regular curriculum for public librarians. This study also provides content expectations for CHI education.

Preparing public librarians for consumer health information service: A nationwide study

A nationwide survey study was conducted to gain understanding as to how to prepare public librarians for consumer health information service. Findings indicate that the popular health information needs encountered by public librarians cover a wide variety of topics, including the human body, a medical/health condition, a disease, a medical concept, and fitness/diet/nutrition. The top two challenges faced by public librarians when providing consumer health information service are difficulty in interpreting patrons' questions and lack of knowledge about available and trusted/appropriate medical/health information sources. Public librarians wish to receive training on a number of topics that could help address the challenges they face, and the most favorable training format for them, among all the options provided in the survey, is the self-paced online tutorial. This study constitutes the basis for establishing training requirements and developing training programs to meet the needs of public librarians. Their mastery of the necessary skills, knowledge and competencies via training will lead to effective and efficient delivery of consumer health information service in public libraries, and ultimately generate optimal patron experiences.

CHI서비스 활성화를 위한 협력네트워크시스템 구축에 관한 연구

Because of the increased interest in health, medical care, and wellness, the utilization of health-related information resources, especially those found on the Internet, has been rapidly increasing. In addition, despite encountering an increasing number of health and medical-related reference questions in public libraries, public librarians feel limitations in their ability to perform these types of reference services. Therefore, this study proposed the cooperative network system model for vitalizing CHI Services, meaning that all the related agencies, including public libraries, medical libraries, medical institutions, and the health and medical community collaboratively provide consumer health information service. This study presented in detail the key elements of the cooperation model, the subject of cooperation, target sources for cooperation, the content of cooperation, operations of CHI-providing sites, operations and roles of Cooperation Centers, and directions for cooperating with commercial institutions.