Consumer health informatics

Figure 1

Figure 2

Table 1
 

Appendix

I decided to focus on selected topics from the field of consumer health informatics because I see that the progress in medical informatics during the past couple of years is less in specific technological advances and more as a shift in attention towards consumer issues. Therefore, I focused on some traditional medical informatics topics, such as information retrieval, decision support, education, and electronic health records, and tried to report advances in this field from the perspective of consumer health informatics.

Crude evidence for a "paradigm change" in medical informatics from provider oriented to consumer oriented was found in the fact that the average number of publications indexed by Medline containing the words "consumer and (informatics or computer*)" has increased more than sevenfold between 1986-7 and 1998-9 and that more articles discussing these concepts were published in the past four years (1996-9) than in the 30 years before (1966-95) (Figure 1)  
 

Figure 1

Even more impressive is the growth in literature containing the term "internet": from eight publications in 1992, the number of publications rose to 216 in 1995, 681 in 1997, and 1413 in 1999 (Figure 2)
 

Figure 2

Table 1  Comparison of provider oriented medical informatics and consumer health informatics