ICTs and Family Physicians Human Capital Upgrading.Delightful Chimera or Harsh Reality?

In the present paper we provide a quantitative assessment of ICTs role in Family Physicians/General Practitioners (GPs) medical daily practice and scientific performance. It focus on the Portuguese underexplored context, where the Health Sector has been under pressure for wide and profound reforms. These reforms have been extensively relying on ICTs, namely on the Internet. Based on the responses of 342 GPs, we concluded that 94% uses the Internet and 57% agrees that the Internet is essential to their medical daily practice. This is a slightly lower percentage than that observed for other European physicians (62%). GPs tend to use the Internet mainly for professional purposes. On average, they spend 10 hours/week on the Internet for professional purposes. Further data shows that to have or to be enrolled in advanced training fosters the use of the Internet for professional purposes, which in its turn, tends to grant GPs access to more and up-to-date information and knowledge on these matters. A worrisome evidence is that at the workplace, a substantial proportion of GPs (over 70%) do not use the Internet or other related ICTs, namely Telemedicine. Although Electronic Prescription is used by roughly 60% of the respondent GPs, for all other activities – teleconsultation, telediagnosis, and telemonitoring – only a meagre percentage of physicians (10%) claim to use such technologies. Thus, Telemedicine at the workplace is still a chimera. Notwithstanding such dishearten scenario, our data shows that the Internet for the respondent GPs has a critical role on updating and improving their professional knowledge basis. They recognise, however, that the vast majority of GPs lack specific and general training in ICT-related technologies. In fact, half of them agree that they need to attend specific training actions on ICTs. A large percentage of GPs admitted that in the previous year they did not take any professional training targeting ICTs and those who did undertook rather short-term (less than one week) courses: Because of that, such training handicap uncovers that a large part of Portuguese GPs may be unable to reap the benefits of ICTs in their daily medical practice.GPs; Human Capital; Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)

Progress and opportunities in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender health communications

This article describes elements of effective health communication and highlights strategies that may best be adopted or adapted in relation to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) populations. Studies have documented the utility of multidimensional approaches to health communication from the macro level of interventions targeting entire populations to the micro level of communication between health care provider and consumer. Although evidence of health disparities in LGBT communities underscores the importance of population-specific interventions, health promotion campaigns rarely target these populations and health communication activities seldom account for the diversity of LGBT communities. Advances in health communication suggest promising direction for LGBT-specific risk prevention and health promotion strategies on community, group, and provider/consumer levels. Opportunities for future health communication efforts include involving LGBT communities in the development of appropriate health communication campaigns and materials, enhancing media literacy among LGBT individuals, supporting LGBT-focused research and evaluation of health communication activities, and ensuring that health care providers possess the knowledge, skills, and competency to communicate effectively with LGBT consumers

Choosing and using methodological search filters : searchers' views

© 2014 The authors. Health Information and Libraries Journal © 2014 Health Libraries Group.Peer reviewedPostprin

Text 4 Health: Addressing Consumer Health Information Needs via Text Reference Service

This study seeks to provide empirical evidence about how health-related questions are answered in text reference service in order to further the understanding of how to best use texting as a reference service venue to fulfill people’s health information needs. Two hundred health reference transactions from My Info Quest, the first nation-wide collaborative text reference service, were analyzed identify the types of questions, length of transactions, question-answering behavior, and information sources used in the transactions. Findings indicate that texting-based health reference transactions are usually brief, and cover a wide variety of topics. The most popular questions are those seeking general factual information about human body, medical/health conditions, diseases, or medical concepts/jargons. Great variance is discovered among the question-answering behavior, with only a little more than half of the answers containing citation to information sources. The study will inform the practice of health reference service via texting, and help libraries make evidence-based decisions on establishing service policies and procedures, providing training for librarians, and ultimately implementing the service successfully

The Digital Distribution of Public Health News Surrounding the Human Papillomavirus Vaccination: A Longitudinal Infodemiology Study

Background: New media changes the dissemination of public health information and misinformation. During a guest appearance on the Today Show, US Representative Michele Bachmann claimed that human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines could cause “mental retardation”. Objective: The purpose of this study is to explore how new media influences the type of public health information users access, as well as the impact to these platforms after a major controversy. Specifically, this study aims to examine the similarities and differences in the dissemination of news articles related to the HPV vaccination between Google News and Twitter, as well as how the content of news changed after Michele Bachmann’s controversial comment. Methods: This study used a purposive sampling to draw the first 100 news articles that appeared on Google News and the first 100 articles that appeared on Twitter from August 1-October 31, 2011. Article tone, source, topics, concerns, references, publication date, and interactive features were coded. The intercoder reliability had a total agreement of .90. Results: Results indicate that 44.0% of the articles (88/200) about the HPV vaccination had a positive tone, 32.5% (65/200) maintained a neutral tone, while 23.5% (47/200) presented a negative tone. Protection against diseases 82.0% (164/200), vaccine eligibility for females 75.5% (151/200), and side effects 59.0% (118/200) were the top three topics covered by these articles. Google News and Twitter articles significantly differed in article tone, source, topics, concerns covered, types of sources referenced in the article, and uses of interactive features. Most notably, topic focus changed from public health information towards political conversation after Bachmann’s comment. Before the comment, the HPV vaccine news talked more often about vaccine dosing (P\u3c .001), duration (P=.005), vaccine eligibility for females (P=.03), and protection against diseases (P=.04) than did the later pieces. After the controversy, the news topic shifted towards politics (P=.01) and talked more about HPV vaccine eligibility for males (P=.01). Conclusions: This longitudinal infodemiology study suggests that new media influences public health communication, knowledge transaction, and poses potential problems in the amount of misinformation disseminated during public health campaigns. In addition, the study calls for more research to adopt an infodemiology approach to explore relationships between online information supply and public health decisions

Seeking Health Information on the Internet

The primary objective of this research is to obtain insight into information seeking behaviour on the Internet with regard to health information. Theories from two research areas are used to explain the use of the Internet for health information: health behaviour and the adoption and use of new technologies. The data was gathered through a pencil-and-paper questionnaire (N=123), between August and October 2003. All respondents were experienced with using the Internet to seek health information. Using both lineair and logistic regression we investigate how demographic differences (e.g. age, gender, marital status), internet accessibility (e.g. physical, use patterns) and user needs (e.g. general health situation, limitations) influence: 1) the frequency of going online for health information 2) the kind of health information that is sought after, 3) the online sources that people use for health information (e.g. portals, newsletters, various websites). Results show that gender, Internet experience and physical limitations are significant for the frequency of going online. For the kinds of information that people look for only gender has significant influence. Furthermore, the places that people look for health information are influenced significantly by gender and (to lesser extent) whether people have an Internet connection at home. There is also a significant difference between men and women with regard to the number of websites visited and the way they use the gathered information. This investigation shows that men and women seek information differently. As a consequence, different groups are confronted with different risks

Improving differential diagnosis of vocal cord dysfunction

textPurpose: The purpose of this study was to assess whether the factors historically presented in the literature to differentiate vocal cord dysfunction (VCD) from breathing difficulties of other etiologies accurately predict and identify patients who have VCD. The researchers were also interested in whether patients with VCD have a higher risk of misdiagnosis than patients with breathing difficulties of other etiologies. Finally, the present study investigated whether patients with VCD were more likely to have their symptoms attributed to psychological factors than patients with breathing difficulties of other etiologies. Method: A survey comprised of 23 questions regarding the participants’ previous and current diagnoses, triggers that precede breathing difficulty, and whether or not the participants have ever been misdiagnosed was posted to internet support groups, websites, blogs, and forums. The final participant pool included 20 participants with VCD and 25 participants with asthma. Results: None of the factors investigated accurately differentiated participants with asthma from participants with VCD one hundred percent of the time. However, participants with VCD were more likely to report throat tightness during an attack, association of an attack with symptoms of acid reflux, and rapid resolution of symptoms without treatment. Conversely, participants with asthma were more likely to report expiratory stridor and chest tightness, full resolution of symptoms with use of asthma medications, nocturnal symptoms or symptoms just after waking, and symptoms that seemed to be triggered by environmental agents or allergens. Preliminary findings from the present study suggest that patients with VCD are both more likely to receive a misdiagnosis and have their symptoms attributed to psychological factors than participants with asthma. Conclusion: A diagnosis of VCD must be made very carefully, ideally with instrumental evaluation of the vocal mechanism during an acute “attack” of breathing difficulty. The factors identified in the literature to differentially diagnose patients with asthma from patients with VCD do not accurately differentiate these populations. These findings suggest that continued education about the nature of VCD and differential diagnosis should be paramount to medical professionals.Communication Sciences and Disorder

Talking together : consumer communities in healthcare

Consumer involvement in computer mediated communities (CMCs) is increasing particularly in high involvement services such as healthcare. This paper examines the role of CMCs as providers of patient information and support and the subsequent effect on the relationship between 'informed' consumers and health care providers. The evolving dialogue between consumers in virtual communities provides one key axis along which professional service consumption will evolve. The challenge for service consumers is to develop frameworks that facilitate robust dialogue and exchange of information and emotional support to complement their rising authority. The parallel challenge is for the established medical profession to recognise the consequences of this evolving dialogue and develop approaches to service delivery that effectively engage with consumers on the basis of this increasing authority