Granting Access to Information Is Not Enough: Towards an Integrated Concept of Health Information Acquisition

Abstract

AbstractIn the WHO definition of Quality of Life, the environmental domain includes a subdomain called Opportunities for acquiring new information and skills. The information landscape has drastically changed over the past three decades, and now offers opportunities for acquiring information to almost everybody at any time, as the more recent technologies penetrated worldwide. It is thus worth evaluating if and how this change is reflected into the specific subdomain at stake and into the way it is measured. Before and while the information revolution was happening, the subdomain has been classically measured by giving as much attention to the accessibility of information as to the capability of acquiring it. We argue that these two components do not have the same weight nowadays, and that measurements should reflect this conceptual consideration. The more accessible information is indeed also often becoming overwhelming, and it is calling for an improved ability to appraise it. Technologies can help not just measuring the capability to appraise this information, but first and foremost they could build on individually acquired data to make the information more tailored to the user. This is done in other domains than health, and specifically in the marketing field, which has been already an inspiration for the health communication field and could contribute to advancements in the health behavioral domain. Therefore, after discussing how the concept of health literacy could inform the conceptual refinement of the subdomain at stake, this chapter will focus on how personal Internet-enabled technologies could contribute to its measurement in real-time, helping healthcare institutions and policy-makers to make health information more tailored and more accessible to the users.