consumerhealthinformatics

Last year I developed a course titled “Consumer Health Informatics & Web 2.0 in Healthcare”.  It was an excellent learning experience for me and hopefully beneficial for the students as well.  The course was offered last semester in our College of Osteopathic Medicine – Biomedical Informatics Program.  I plan to offer a similar course next semester in our College of Pharmacy tailored for those students and capitalizing on the lessons learned from the previous version.

Pharmacy is a profession in healthcare.  Pharmacy informatics is a specialty within this profession. It is not yet one of the recognized specialty areas by the Board of Pharmaceutical Specialties, but it is a specialty nonetheless.  Consumer health informatics is a subspecialty within informatics, and can be integrated with pharmacy or any other profession in healthcare.  My path has led to immersion in the possibilities associated with consumer health informatics.

Consumer health informatics (CHI), like medical informatics, health informatics, and pharmacy informatics, suffers from a bit of an identity crisis – or at least a lack of consensus terminology.  The two working definitions for CHI that I am particular to are:

“…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.”

British Medical Journal article by Eysenbach

"…studies from a patient/consumer perspective the use of electronic information and communication to improve medical outcomes and the health care decision-making process."