Health information in the digital age: an empirical study of the perceived benefits and costs of seeking and using health information from online sources

ChatGPT: A concise Google alternative for people seeking accurate and comprehensive carpal tunnel syndrome information

Popular artificial intelligence systems, like ChatGPT, may be used by anyone to generate humanlike answers to questions. This study assessed whether ChatGPT version 3.5 (ChatGPTv3.5) or the first five results from a Google search provide more accurate, complete, and concise answers to the most common questions patients have about carpal tunnel syndrome. Three orthopedic hand surgeons blindly graded the answers using Likert scales to assess accuracy, completeness, and conciseness. ChatGPTv3.5 and the first five Google results provide answers to carpal tunnel syndrome questions that are similar in accuracy and completeness, but ChatGPTv3.5 answers are more concise. ChatGPTv3.5, being freely accessible to the public, is therefore a good resource for patients seeking concise, Google-equivalent answers to specific medical questions regarding carpal tunnel syndrome. ChatGPTv3.5, given its lack of updated sourcing and risk of presenting false information, should not replace frequently updated academic websites as the primary online medical resource for patients.

Digital Media Use and Health Literacy Levels of Women in Turkey

Obtaining information about women's use of digital media, their behavior in acquiring health information in the digital environment and their level of health literacy will fill an important gap in the literature. This research was conducted to examine the digital media use and health literacy levels of women in Turkey. The population of the research was the female population between the ages of 20-60 in Turkey in 2020, and the sample consisted of 404 women in this age range. The data of this analytical-cross-sectional study were collected online with the Personal Information Form and the Turkish Health Literacy Scale-32. It was determined that 83.9% of the women participating in the study used digital media and 82.9% of them obtained health information in the digital environment. In the categorical score distribution of the scale, it was determined that the health literacy level of 48.8% of women was insufficient, 26.2% problematic/limited, 19.8% sufficient and 5.2% excellent. A significant relationship was determined between women's health literacy level and age, marital status, education level, employment status, perception of income level, place of residence, use of digital media and duration of use (p < .05). We concluded that majority of women in Turkey use digital media, obtain health information in the digital environment and have low health literacy levels.

Co-producing an online patient public community research hub: a qualitative study exploring the perspectives of national institute for health research (NIHR) research champions in England

BACKGROUND

Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) should be embedded as part of researchers' everyday practice. However, this can be challenging. Creating a digital presence for PPIE as part of Higher Education Institutes' (HEIs) infrastructure may be one way of supporting this. This can support how information is made available to patients and members of the public, but relatively little is known about how HEIs can best do this. Our aim was to develop a university website for patients and members of the public to learn about ways to get actively involved in research and be able to access the results of health and social care research.

METHODS

This project involved working as partners with five National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Research Champions. NIHR Research Champions are volunteers who raise awareness and share experiences about health and social care research. Content of a prototype Patient Public Community Research Hub website was co-produced with the Research Champions, and then 15 NIHR Research Champions from across England were asked for their views about the website.

FINDINGS

The information collected told us that the Patient Public Community Research Hub was viewed as being beneficial for increasing visibility of PPIE opportunities and sharing the findings of studies though needs further work: to make the information more user-friendly; to improve the methods for directing people to the site and to create new ways of connecting with people. It provides a foundation for further co-development and evaluation. A set of recommendations has been developed that may be of benefit to other HEIs and organisations who are committed to working with patients and members of the public.

Exploring how members of the public access and use health research and information: a scoping review

BACKGROUND

Making high-quality health and care information available to members of the general public is crucial to support populations with self-care and improve health outcomes. While attention has been paid to how the public accesses and uses health information generally (including personal records, commercial product information or reviews on healthcare practitioners and organisations) and how practitioners and policy-makers access health research evidence, no overview exists of the way that the public accesses and uses high quality health and care information.

PURPOSE

This scoping review aimed to map research evidence on how the public accesses and uses a specific type of health information, namely health research and information that does not include personal, product and organisational information.

METHODS

Electronic database searches [CINAHL Plus, MEDLINE, PsycInfo, Social Sciences Full Text, Web of Science and SCOPUS] for English language studies of any research design published between 2010-2022 on the public's access and use of health research or information (as defined above). Data extraction and analysis was informed by the Joanna Briggs Institute protocol for scoping reviews, and reported in accordance with the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews.

RESULTS

The search identified 4410 records. Following screening of 234 full text studies, 130 studies were included. One-hundred-and-twenty-nine studies reported on the public's sources of health-research or information; 56 reported the reasons for accessing health research or information and 14 reported on the use of this research and information. The scoping exercise identified a substantial literature on the broader concept of 'health information' but a lack of reporting of the general public's access to and use of health research. It found that 'traditional' sources of information are still relevant alongside newer sources; knowledge of barriers to accessing information focused on personal barriers and on independent searching, while less attention had been paid to barriers to access through other people and settings, people's lived experiences, and the cultural knowledge required.

CONCLUSIONS

The review identified areas where future primary and secondary research would enhance current understanding of how the public accesses and utilises health research or information, and contribute to emerging areas of research.

Seasonal Patterns and Trends in Dermatoses in Poland

Background: The amount of data available online is constantly increasing, including search behavior and tracking trends in domains such as Google. Analyzing the data helps to predict patient needs and epidemiological events more accurately. Our study aimed to identify dermatology-related terms that occur seasonally and any search anomalies during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Methods: The data were gathered using Google Trends, with 69 entries between January-2010 and December-2020 analyzed. We conducted the Seasonal Mann–Kendal Test to determine the strength of trends. The month with the highest seasonal component (RSV) and the lowest seasonal component (RSV) was indicated for every keyword. Groups of keywords occurring together regularly at specific periods of the year were shown. Results: We found that some topics were seasonally searched in winter (e.g., herpes, scabies, candida) and others in summer (e.g., erythema, warts, urticaria). Conclusions: Interestingly, downward trends in searches on sexually transmitted diseases in comparison with increased infection rates reported officially show a strong need for improved sexual education in Poland. There were no significant differences in trends for coronavirus-related cutaneous symptoms during 2020. We have shown that the seasonality of dermatologically related terms searched in Poland via Google did not differ significantly during SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

An Investigation of Patient Decisions to Use eHealth

eHealth service has received increasing attention. Patients can consult online doctors via the Internet, and then physically visit the doctors for further diagnosis and treatments. Although extant research has focused on the adoption of eHealth services, the decision-making process from online to offline health services still remains unclear. This study aims to examine patients’ decisions to use online and offline health services by integrating the extended valence framework and the halo effect. By analyzing 221 samples with online consultation experiences, the results show that trust significantly influences perceived benefits and perceived risks, while trust, perceived benefits, and perceived risks significantly influence the intention to consult. The intention to consult positively influences the intention to visit. Considering the moderating effects of payment types, the influence of perceived risks on the intention to consult is larger for the free group than for the paid group. The findings are useful to better understand patients’ decisions to use eHealth.

An Empirical Study of Older Adult’s Voice Assistant Use for Health Information Seeking

Although voice assistants are increasingly being adopted by older adults, we lack empirical research on how they interact with these devices for health information seeking. Also, prior work shows how voice assistant responses can provide misleading or inaccurate information and be harmful particularly in health contexts. Because of increased health needs while aging, this paper studies older adult’s (ages 65+) health-related voice assistant interactions. Motivated by a lack of empirical evidence for how older adults approach information seeking with emerging technologies, we first conducted a survey of n = 201 older adults to understand how they engage voice assistants compared to a range of offline and digital sources for health information seeking. Findings show how voice assistants were used for confirmatory health queries, with users showing signs of distrust. As much prior work focuses on perceptions of voice assistant use, we conducted scenario-based interviews with n = 35 older adults to study health-related voice assistant behavior. In interviews, participants engaged with different health topics (flu, migraine, high blood pressure) and scenario types (symptom-driven, behavior-driven) using a voice assistant. Findings show how conversational and human-like expectations with voice assistants lead to information breakdowns between the older adult and voice assistant. This paper contributes a nuanced query-level analysis of older adults’ voice-based health information seeking behaviors. Further, data provide evidence for how query reformulation happens with complex topics in voice-based information seeking. We use our findings to discuss how voice interfaces can better support older adults’ health information seeking behaviors and expectations.

Readability of the American, Canadian, and British Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Societies' Patient Materials

OBJECTIVE

Patient education materials across 3 national English otolaryngology-head and neck surgery (OHNS) societies: the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (AAO-HNS), the Canadian Society of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (CSOHNS), and Ear, Nose, and Throat United Kingdom (ENT UK) were examined to determine whether they are written at a level suitable for patient comprehension.

STUDY DESIGN

Cross-sectional study.

SETTING

Online patient materials presented through OHNS national societies.

METHODS

Readability was calculated using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease Score, and Simple Measure of Gobbledygook Index. All public patient education materials available through the CSOHNS, AAO-HNS, and ENT UK websites were assessed. Patient education materials were grouped into categories by subspecialty.

RESULTS

In total, 128 patient materials from the 3 societies were included in the study. All 3 societies required a minimum grade 9 reading comprehension level to understand their online materials. According to Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, the CSOHNS required a significantly higher reading grade level to comprehend the materials presented when compared to AAO-HNS (11.3 vs 9.9; 95% CI, 0.5-2.4; P < .01) and ENT UK (11.3 vs 9.4; 95% CI, 0.9-2.9; P < .01). Patient education materials related to rhinology were the least readable among all 3 societies.

CONCLUSION

This study suggests that the reading level of the current patient materials presented through 3 national OHNS societies are written at a level that exceeds current recommendations. Promisingly, it highlights an improvement for the readability of patient materials presented through the AAO-HNS.

Searching for Social Media Addiction: A Content Analysis of Top Websites Found through Online Search Engines

Disordered social media use, often referred to as “social media addiction”, has not been officially recognized by medical bodies such as the American Psychiatric Association or the World Health Organization. However, websites still present information to laypeople on how to treat and manage social media addiction, which can pose the risk of spreading low quality or incorrect information. As such, we aimed to assess how the most popular social media addiction websites present information across multiple metrics. We conducted an in-depth online search to identify the top social media addiction websites in November 2019 (N = 23). Websites were separated into four distinct classifications: (1) treatment/therapy/medical; (2) informational; (3) news article; and (4) blog/essay. Based on previous website analysis research, three trained coders evaluated these websites on six metrics: (1) design; (2) credibility; (3) accessibility; (4) literacy; (5) engagement; and (6) social media addiction content. Design features were the top-rated metric across all websites, followed by credibility. Websites scored the lowest for the engagement and social media addiction content metrics. Across website classifications, scores for social media addiction content varied greatly, with blog/essay websites ranking the lowest and informational websites ranking the highest. Our findings provide necessary information for both patients and healthcare providers, apprising these individuals and the field about the current online health information landscape for disordered social media use.

eHealth Literacy and Self-care Behavior during the Coronavirus Disease-19 Pandemic among Youths: A Path Analysis

BACKGROUND: eHealth literacy can affect one’s health behavior through the intention to motivate individuals and allow them to make health-related choices. AIM: This study aimed to examine the association between eHealth literacy and self-care behavior among youths in Yogyakarta during the coronavirus disease pandemic. METHODS: In this cross-sectional study, 455 never-married youths aged 15–24 years who lived in Yogyakarta Province completed the online survey that was conducted from October 5 to October 19, 2020. There were some indicators measured in the survey: eHealth Literacy, health information-seeking behavior, the intention of health maintenance, self-maintenance of health behavior, perceived behavioral control, subjective norms, and attitude toward health maintenance. Path analysis was conducted to determine the influencing factors of eHealth literacy and self-care behavior. RESULTS: Five in 10 youths accessed the internet more than 4 hours a day, though more than half of youths had low eHealth literacy levels. Intention (β = 0.09; 95% CI = 0.01–0.18; p = 0.037), perceived behavioral control (β = 0.46; 95% CI = 0.38–0.54; p ≤ 0.001), and subjective norms (β = 0.24; 95% CI = 0.16–0.33; p ≤ 0.001) had a significant positive direct effect on youth self-care behavior. Attitude indirectly affects self-care behavior through the intention (β = 0.46; 95% CI = 0.39–0.53; p ≤ 0.001) together with eHealth literacy (β = 0.11; 95% CI= 0.04–0.18; p = 0.001). CONCLUSION: Health literacy does not explicitly affect youths’ self-care behavior, but it becomes crucial when it builds youths’ intention to behave healthier. The positive impact of intention to enhance self-health care seems to have occurred only if eHealth literacy was adopted.

Socio-demographic characteristics affect health information seeking on the Internet in Turkey

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this paper was to determine the effects of certain socio-demographic characteristics of Turkish individuals who seek health information on the Internet.

METHODS

This study was granted permission to use data obtained by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TSI) in 2018 under their Household Information Technology Use (HITU) study. The original sample for this research comprised 19,389 participants.

RESULTS

Age, gender, educational level, place of residence and frequency of Internet use were all found to impact the participants' health information seeking behaviour on the Internet. Health information was sought more frequently by women than men, by younger than older people and by those with higher levels of education. Also, health information searches were conducted more often in developed regions than in less-developed regions. In addition, it was also found that the habit of seeking health information was more common among those who use the Internet more frequently.

CONCLUSION

Several socio-demographic characteristics of individuals affect their health information seeking behaviour on the Internet. All individuals should be granted equivalent access to reliable health information by taking sociodemographic characteristics and discrepancies into consideration.

Use and Perceptions of Opioids versus Marijuana among People Living with HIV

Objectives: In this study, we examined use of and interest in using opioids and marijuana, particularly in relation to use motives and perceived barriers to use, among people living with HIV (PLWH). Methods: We analyzed online survey data from 304 PLWH in the United States recruited via social media in Summer 2018. Results: In this sample (Mage = 30.86, 40.5% male, 64.5% white), 16.1% reported current (past 30-day) use of opioids, 18.1% marijuana, and 15.8% both. Participants reported more use motives and fewer barriers to using marijuana versus opioids (p's < .001). The most frequently endorsed motive for using either/both drugs were to cope with pain and stress/anxiety. Highest-rated barriers to using either/both drugs were missing symptoms of worsening illness and addiction concerns. Regression analyses indicated that current opioid use correlated with reporting greater opioid use motives; among past-month opioid nonusers, greater interest in using opioids correlated with greater opioid use motives. Current marijuana use correlated with reporting greater marijuana use motives and greater barriers; among past-month marijuana nonusers, greater interest in using marijuana correlated with greater marijuana use motives and fewer barriers. Conclusions: Use motives and barriers differentially correlated with use and interest in use across drugs, thereby indicating different intervention approaches to address appropriate use.

Using Natural Language Processing Techniques to Provide Personalized Educational Materials for Chronic Disease Patients in China: Development and Assessment of a Knowledge-Based Health Recommender System

BACKGROUND

Health education emerged as an important intervention for improving the awareness and self-management abilities of chronic disease patients. The development of information technologies has changed the form of patient educational materials from traditional paper materials to electronic materials. To date, the amount of patient educational materials on the internet is tremendous, with variable quality, which makes it hard to identify the most valuable materials by individuals lacking medical backgrounds.

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this study was to develop a health recommender system to provide appropriate educational materials for chronic disease patients in China and evaluate the effect of this system.

METHODS

A knowledge-based recommender system was implemented using ontology and several natural language processing (NLP) techniques. The development process was divided into 3 stages. In stage 1, an ontology was constructed to describe patient characteristics contained in the data. In stage 2, an algorithm was designed and implemented to generate recommendations based on the ontology. Patient data and educational materials were mapped to the ontology and converted into vectors of the same length, and then recommendations were generated according to similarity between these vectors. In stage 3, the ontology and algorithm were incorporated into an mHealth system for practical use. Keyword extraction algorithms and pretrained word embeddings were used to preprocess educational materials. Three strategies were proposed to improve the performance of keyword extraction. System evaluation was based on a manually assembled test collection for 50 patients and 100 educational documents. Recommendation performance was assessed using the macro precision of top-ranked documents and the overall mean average precision (MAP).

RESULTS

The constructed ontology contained 40 classes, 31 object properties, 67 data properties, and 32 individuals. A total of 80 SWRL rules were defined to implement the semantic logic of mapping patient original data to the ontology vector space. The recommender system was implemented as a separate Web service connected with patients' smartphones. According to the evaluation results, our system can achieve a macro precision up to 0.970 for the top 1 recommendation and an overall MAP score up to 0.628.

CONCLUSIONS

This study demonstrated that a knowledge-based health recommender system has the potential to accurately recommend educational materials to chronic disease patients. Traditional NLP techniques combined with improvement strategies for specific language and domain proved to be effective for improving system performance. One direction for future work is to explore the effect of such systems from the perspective of patients in a practical setting.

Conference season

Health library and information workers no longer find themselves restricted to presenting at purely local or national health-related library events, a diversity evidenced by the two conferences supported by CILIP's Health Libraries Group this month, June 2019. The Health Libraries Group is an official sponsor of #EBLIP10, the 10th international Evidence Based Library and Information Practice conference, which encourages us to think about the evidence we collect and use to inform practice. The Health Libraries Group also strengthens its links with EAHIL: The European Association of Health Information and Libraries by aligning the content of this year's Virtual Issue of the Health Information and Libraries Journal with EAHIL 2019s themes of evidence-based practice, impact & assessment, and technology uptake, available at: https://bit.ly/2PAZw2X.

Exploring the Determinants of Online Health Information-Seeking Behavior Using a Meta-Analytic Approach

Although key factors of online health information-seeking behavior (OHISB), such as self-efficacy, Internet experience, and perceived ease of use, are analyzed in many studies, the research results are controversial. The purpose of this meta-analysis, based on 27 related empirical studies, is to explore the determinants of OHISB. The determinants of OHISB are classified into four categories: demographic characteristic factors, cognitive factors, internal factors, and external factors. According to the results of the analysis using Stata13.0, our study found a weak effect of perceived cost and health anxiety on the OHISB, while subjective norm, perceived usefulness, and attitude have a strong positive effect on the OHISB. Understanding the determinants of OHISB is beneficial in order to know why users utilize online health applications. The findings of the study can contribute to developing and extending the existing theoretical concepts.