Cabrisos, Danielle Rollaine J.

Ojales, Angela Karla M.

BS Pharmacy II
PHARRES2206L

Guide Questions:

1. Describe the consumers/patients using their characteristics as consumers of health

information.

Answer: Health Information consumers are becoming not only more involved in their
own healthcare but also more information technology-minded. However, the needs,
wants, and preferences of the patients or consumers may vary from what medical
professionals think their needs, wants and preferences are. With this difference, they
have identified two distinct groups of health information consumers. These are
independent actives and passives, doctor-dependent actives and passives. The
independent actives easily understand health information and more likely to seek from
multiple sources such as physicians, books, and the internet. Doctor-dependent actives,
on the other hand, have difficulty in understanding health information and would
primarily rely on their physician’s decisions and would not seek further guidelines on the
internet. Both independent passives and doctor-dependent passives give less value to
health information.

2. Examine issues surrounding consumers’ use of health information technology.

Answer: The greatest challenge of the health information consumers is the access to
information and information understanding such as the difficulty to understand health
related web-based resources and more often to have varying levels of quality and are
not always easy to comprehend. With the number of health-related websites growing, it
has become more difficult for consumers to assess the quality of health information on
the internet, including which websites they can trust. Moreover, health information
consumers are heterogeneous individuals who have diverse needs and preferences for
health information and possess diverse behavioral and cognitive patterns which would
vary in the acquisition and understanding of information from one individual to another.
As stated in the article, in attempting to obtain health information through the use of
technology and internet, consumers generally have ineffective search strategies when
conducting online searches. According to Cramton, it has been shown that the lack of
contextualization is a common problem in healthcare communication. Thus, the issue of
information understanding is coming to the forefront.

3. Cite a critique way to bridge the gap between access to information and information
understanding using models of communication and taxonomy learning outcomes.
 Answer:

The figure above shows the Te’eni Model of Communication that introduces the
necessity of the cognitive effort of the perception of the communicator to ensure
effective communication, and with this effectivity one could overcome the difficulties
and gaps about the message. Through the use of effective contextualization and
personalization, it reduces communication complexity and makes it easier for the
consumers to understand and assimilate the message resulting to mutual understanding
and it bridges the gap between access to information and information understanding.

Alongside the model of communication, instruments are needed to be able to

measure the users’ level of understanding given the lack of contextualization and
personalization. Specifically, mutual understanding as the outcome was developed
based on the learning outcomes of Bloom’s taxonomy. This includes six hierarchical
levels of learning outcomes: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis
and evaluation. This taxonomy provides a useful structure to categorize and prepare
test questions in the mutual understanding instrument. Consequently, researches have
been carried out to enable the emerging consumers of health information to bridge the
gap between access to information and information understanding.

4. Describe the current trends and future directions in consumer health informatics.