Health Information-Seeking Behaviour on the Internet
The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control has published a literature review providing an overview of online health information-seeking behaviour among European adults from the perspective of both the health consumer and the health professional.Note some highlights from the report:
"..the wealth of information available [on the Internet] means that ‘healthcare professionals are increasingly finding that they have more information available than they can handle with confidence in their busy time schedules’ and ‘the hardest task now is to actually locate the information required from the flood of information received’. The literature also highlights the difficulty of identifying and filtering the most useful, accurate and credible sources while searching online for health information.""In a study in the British Medical Journal, researchers also found that, out of 26 medical situations investigated 'Google searches found the correct diagnoses in 15 of the cases’", calling for caution if using Google (or any other general internet search engine) to search for a diagnosis.
Click on the post title for access to the 12 page PDF: "Literature review on health information-seeking behaviour on the web: a health consumer and health professional perspective" ~ ECDC Technical reports(Oct 2011).
Labels: credibility of information, ECDC, information literacy, information seeking behaviour, internet users research, medical information search
posted by Ann Celestine @ 10:38 AM
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