Online health information seeking behavior, healthcare access, and health status during exceptional times

Online health information seeking behavior (e-HISB) is becoming increasingly common and the trend has accelerated as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic when individuals strongly relied upon the Internet to stay informed by becoming exposed to a wider array of health information. Despite e-HISB having become a global trend, very few empirical investigations have analyzed its potential influence on healthcare access and individuals' health status. In this paper, we try to fill this gap. We use data from the second SHARE Corona Survey, supplemented with data from the previous 8th wave of SHARE, and estimate a recursive model of e-HISB, healthcare access, and individuals' health status that accounts for individuals' unobserved heterogeneity. Our findings suggest that e-HISB can empower individuals to better understand health concerns, facilitating improved health condition management. However, e-HISB can also trigger a chain reaction, as navigating vast amonts of online health information can heighten fear and anxiety. This increased anxiety may lead to higher utilization of medical services, adversely affecting individuals' perceptions of their health.

Narrative messages, information seeking and COVID-19 vaccine intention: The moderating role of perceived behavioral control

Purpose

The main purposes of the current study are to examine 1) the influence of narrative vs statistics messages on COVID-19 related information seeking and COVID-19 vaccine intention and 2) the moderating role of perceived behavioral control (PBC).

Design

Data for a between-subject randomized experiment were collected online. The manipulation messages were presented as screenshots from the CDC’s Facebook page.

Setting

The participants were recruited from Amazon MTurk.

Subjects

A total of 300 subjects participated in the study, who were 18 years and above (M = 38.40).

Measures

Intention to seek information, COVID-19 vaccine intention, and PBC.

Analysis

To test the hypotheses, we utilized Hayes’s (2014) PROCESS for SPSS (Model 1). For intention to seek information, the main effect of the message manipulation (narrative vs statistics) [b = −2.10, t (300) = −4.14, P < .001] and the interaction [b = .41, t (300) = 3.88, P < .001] were significant. For vaccine intention, the main effects of message manipulation [b = 1.64, t (300) = −2.61, P < .005] and the interaction [b = .34, t (300) = 2.64, P < .005] were significant.

Results

Our research found that narrative messages were more persuasive for both information seeking and vaccine intention. But this was true only in the case of individuals whose PBC was low.

Conclusions

Our findings have critical implications for vaccine promotion research.

Personalised health document summarisation exploiting Unified Medical Language System and topic-based clustering for mobile healthcare

According to the growing interest in mobile healthcare, multi-document summarisation techniques are increasingly required to cope with health information overload and effectively deliver personalised online healthcare information. However, because of the peculiarities of medical terminology and the diversity of subtopics in health documents, multi-document summarisation must consider technical aspects that are different from those of the general domain. In this article, we propose a personalised health document summarisation system that provides a reliable personal health-related summary to general healthcare consumers via mobile devices. Our system generates a personalised summary from multiple online health documents by exploiting biomedical concepts, semantic types and semantic relations extracted from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and analysing individual health records derived from mobile personal health record (PHR) applications. Furthermore, to increase the diversity and coverage of summarised results and to display them in a user-friendly manner on mobile devices, we create a summary that is categorised into subtopics by grouping semantically related sentences through topic-based clustering. The experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed system.

Seeking Health Information Online: The Moderating Effects of Problematic Situations on User Intention

Purpose

This study investigates how online user intention in searching health information is affected by problematic situations.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on the Theory of Reasoned Action, the Technology Acceptance Model, and Sense-making theory, we propose two dimensions of problematic situations: urgency and severity of health issues being searched online. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey among 214 Wuhan University students and analyzed using hierarchical regression analysis.

Findings

Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and subjective norm can influence user intention to seek health information online. The urgency of problematic situations has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between perceived ease of use and user intention and the relationship between subjective norm and user intention. The severity of problematic situations has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between subjective norm and user intention.

Research limitations

The respondents of the survey are limited to students in one Chinese university, so whether this study’s results can be applied to another population or not remains to be verified. In addition, only two dimensions of problematic situations are considered in this study.

Practical implications

The paper puts forward the moderating effect of problematic situations and verifies it, which is the compensation for online health information-seeking behavior research. Besides, our analyses have implications for professional design of health care systems and related consumer information searches, and improve their performance.

Originality/value

Previous work has reported the effects of problematic situation on user intention to seek health information online, ignoring its influence on other factors. This empirical study extends that work to identify the influence of problematic situation when seeking intention-behavior data in two dimensions, urgency and severity.

Medical informatics research trend analysis: A text mining approach

The objective of this research is to identify major subject areas of medical informatics and explore the time-variant changes therein. As such it can inform the field about where medical informatics research has been and where it is heading. Furthermore, by identifying subject areas, this study identifies the development trends and the boundaries of medical informatics as an academic field. To conduct the study, first we identified 26,307 articles in PubMed archives which were published in the top medical informatics journals within the timeframe of 2002 to 2013. And then, employing a text mining -based semi-automated analytic approach, we clustered major research topics by analyzing the most frequently appearing subject terms extracted from the abstracts of these articles. The results indicated that some subject areas, such as biomedical, are declining, while other research areas such as health information technology (HIT), Internet-enabled research, and electronic medical/health records (EMR/EHR), are growing. The changes within the research subject areas can largely be attributed to the increasing capabilities and use of HIT. The Internet, for example, has changed the way medical research is conducted in the health care field. While discovering new medical knowledge through clinical and biological experiments is important, the utilization of EMR/EHR enabled the researchers to discover novel medical insight buried deep inside massive data sets, and hence, data analytics research has become a common complement in the medical field, rapidly growing in popularity.

Identifying and Understanding the Health Information Experiences and Preferences of Individuals With TBI, SCI, and Burn Injuries

Introduction:

Traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, and burn injury can cause lifelong disability and changes in quality of life. In order to meet the challenges of postinjury life, various types of health information are needed. We sought to identify preferred sources of health information and services for persons with these injuries and discover how accessibility could be improved.

Methods:

Thirty-three persons with injury participated in semistructured interviews. Responses to interview questions were coded using NVivo.

Results:

Participants’ difficulties accessing health information varied by injury type and individually. The majority of respondents found information via the Internet and advocated its use when asked to describe their ideal health information system. Nearly all participants supported the development of a comprehensive care website. When searching for health information, participants sought doctor and support group networks, long-term health outcomes, and treatments specific to their injury.

Conclusion:

To optimize the quality of health information resources, Internet-based health-care platforms should add or highlight access points to connect patients to medical professionals and support networks while aggregating specialized, injury-specific research and treatment information.

Trusting Social Media as a Source of Health Information: Online Surveys Comparing the United States, Korea, and Hong Kong

Background

The Internet has increasingly become a popular source of health information by connecting individuals with health content, experts, and support. More and more, individuals turn to social media and Internet sites to share health information and experiences. Although online health information seeking occurs worldwide, limited empirical studies exist examining cross-cultural differences in perceptions about user-generated, experience-based information compared to expertise-based information sources.

Objective

To investigate if cultural variations exist in patterns of online health information seeking, specifically in perceptions of online health information sources. It was hypothesized that Koreans and Hongkongers, compared to Americans, would be more likely to trust and use experience-based knowledge shared in social Internet sites, such as social media and online support groups. Conversely, Americans, compared to Koreans and Hongkongers, would value expertise-based knowledge prepared and approved by doctors or professional health providers more.

Methods

Survey questionnaires were developed in English first and then translated into Korean and Chinese. The back-translation method ensured the standardization of questions. Surveys were administered using a standardized recruitment strategy and data collection methods.

Results

A total of 826 participants living in metropolitan areas from the United States (n=301), Korea (n=179), and Hong Kong (n=337) participated in the study. We found significant cultural differences in information processing preferences for online health information. A planned contrast test revealed that Koreans and Hongkongers showed more trust in experience-based health information sources (blogs: t_451.50=11.21, P<.001; online support group: t_455.71=9.30, P<.001; social networking sites [SNS]: t_466.75=11.36, P<.001) and also reported using blogs (t_515.31=6.67, P<.001) and SNS (t_529.22=4.51, P<.001) more frequently than Americans. Americans showed a stronger preference for using expertise-based information sources (eg, WebMD and CDC) compared to Koreans and Hongkongers (t_360.02=3.01, P=.003). Trust in expertise-based information sources was universal, demonstrating no cultural differences (Brown-Forsythe F_2,654=1.82, P=.16). Culture also contributed significantly to differences in searching information on behalf of family members (t_480.38=5.99, P<.001) as well as to the goals of information searching.

Conclusions

This research found significant cultural differences in information processing preferences for online health information. Further discussion is included regarding effective communication strategies in providing quality health information.