TORONTO, July 22, 2008 -- Critics who lament the sluggish pace at which e-health is being integrated in to the Canadian health care system should consider the low literacy and technology skills of nearly half the adult population, says the Dean of York University’s Faculty of Health, Harvey Skinner.
Skinner co-developed an e-health literacy scale to assess peoples’ ability to understand health information presented in websites, interactive behaviour change tools (such as smoking cessation web portals) and telephone-assisted services.
With more than 40 per cent of U.S. and Canadian adults showing basic literacy levels below what is considered necessary to optimally participate in civil society, many e-health resources are likely to be inaccessible to large segments of the population, according to two joint studies from York University and the University of Toronto.
“Computers are practically ubiquitous in our society, so it is often assumed that people know how to use them and that they understand the content they find online,” Skinner said. “While you would think that older adults and people from non-industrialized countries would report greater difficulty in these areas, we’re finding a real lack of ability and opportunity to use e-health resources among those we would expect to be skilled users.”
The studies define e-health literacy as the ability to read, use computers, search for information, understand health information, and put it into context. E-health literacy requires that people be able to work with technology, think critically about issues of media and science and navigate through a vast array of information tools and sources to acquire the information necessary to make decisions about their health.
The e-health literacy scale, developed by Cameron D. Norman at the University of Toronto and Harvey Skinner at York University, is an eight-item measure of e-health literacy designed to assess consumers’ combined knowledge, comfort and perceived skills at finding, evaluating and applying electronic health information to health problems.
For the literacy scale study, the researchers chose to examine youth aged 13 to 20 primarily because the demographic has high levels of e-health use and familiarity with information technology tools. A total of 664 participants, 370 boys and 294 girls, completed the literacy scale at four points in time over six months.
The results showed that the e-health literacy scale reliably and consistently captures the literacy of the subject, showing promise as a tool for assessing consumer comfort and skill in using information technology for health.
“This scale has the potential to help clinicians identify those who may or may not benefit from referrals to an e-health resource, such as an online smoking cessation program,” Skinner said. “The next step is to see how it works for other demographics and settings while also exploring the relationship between e-health literacy and health care outcomes.”
The studies by Norman and Skinner, “eHEALS: The eHealth Literacy Scale” and “eHealth Literacy: Essential Skills for Consumer Health in a Networked World”, appeared in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2006. “eHEALS” has been recognized by the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) as a ‘Best Paper of the Year’ and it has also been included in the 2008 IMIA yearbook along with other notable papers deemed to have had a high impact on the field of medical and health informatics over the past year.
York University is the leading interdisciplinary research and teaching university in Canada. York offers a modern, academic experience at the undergraduate and graduate level in Toronto, Canada’s most international city. The third largest university in the country, York is host to a dynamic academic community of 50,000 students and 7,000 faculty and staff, as well as more than 200,000 alumni worldwide. York’s 11 faculties and 24 research centres conduct ambitious, groundbreaking research that is interdisciplinary, cutting across traditional academic boundaries. This distinctive and collaborative approach is preparing students for the future and bringing fresh insights and solutions to real-world challenges. York University is an autonomous, not-for-profit corporation.
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Media contact:
Killeen Kelly, Media Relations, York University, 416 736 2100 x22938 / killeenk@yorku.ca
