Consumer health informatics

Consumer Health Informatics (CHI) is a sub-branch of Health Informatics helps bridge the gap between patients and health resources. It is defined by the American Medical Informatics Association as "the field devoted to informatics from multiple consumer or patient views". The Consumer Health Informatics Working Group (CHIWG) of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) define it as “the use of modern computers and telecommunications to support consumers in obtaining information, analyzing unique health care needs and helping them make decisions about their own health"[1]

CHI includes patient-focused informatics, health literacy, and consumer education. The focus of this field is to allow consumers to manage their own health, through the use of internet-based strategies and resources with consumer-friendly language. Currently, CHI stands at a crossroads between various healthcare related fields such as nursing, public health, health promotion, and health education[2]

The Kaiser model is an example of allowing patients to remotely communicate with their physicians or other healthcare professionals.[3]

Consumer Health Informatics include technologies focused on patients as the primary users to health information.[3]

Consumer Health Informatics includes: Information Resources, Communications, Remote Monitoring, Videoconferencing, and Telepresence.

Medical informatics has expanded rapidly over the past couple of years. After decades of development of information systems designed primarily for physicians and other healthcare managers and professionals, there is an increasing interest in reaching consumers and patients directly through computers and telecommunications systems. Consumer health informatics is the branch of medical informatics that analyses consumers' needs for information; studies and implements methods of making information accessible to consumers; and models and integrates consumers' preferences into medical information systems. Consumer informatics stands at the crossroads of other disciplines, such as nursing informatics, public health, health promotion, health education, library science, and communication science, and is perhaps the most challenging and rapidly expanding field in medical informatics; it is paving the way for health care in the information age.[4]

References

  1. ↑ IMIA, CHIWG. "Consumer Health Informatics". IMIA. Retrieved 8 January 2015.
  2. ↑ American Medical Informatics Association. "Consumer Health Informatics", Bethesda, Maryland 2014. Retrieved on 20 October 2014.
  3. 1 2 Biomedical Informatics by Shortliffe and Cimino (3rd Edition)
  4. ↑ BMJ 2000; 320 : 1713 doi:10.1136/bmj.320.7251.1713 (Published 24 June 2000)

See also

Health informatics

e-patient

Participatory medicine

Health 2.0

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