Patient Education on Mobile Devices: An E-Health Intervention for Low Health Literate Audiences

Pardon me for promoting one of my recent publications, but I just had an article come out in the Journal of Information Science. The abstract for the article is:

Providing health information to low health literate audiences remains a challenge. Beyond message design, realistic delivery models are needed for delivering information to a traditionally hard-to-reach audience. This study investigated two e-health interventions to provide health information on mobile devices — one providing diabetes information and one offering childcare information. Both were well-received, and most of the subjects' usability issues related to the translation of these interventions to the mobile device's smaller screen. The diabetes website was effective in providing information to study participants (as measured by pre- and post-tests of knowledge), while the childcare website was not. Continued work in this area could explore improved design strategies for mobile devices — a delivery model that could be used in doctors' offices, for example. Effective delivery of health information to low health literate audiences is an important issue, and this research highlights a critical element by targeting another potential delivery model.

If you're interested in checking out the article, head to website here.

Private Practice: Researcher's Blog

As part of a project I'm working on right now, I was trying to generate a list of health-oriented shows (in terms of focus or context) that are likely to be popular with the general public. I was looking through the major networks to check out all their shows, and I found something interesting on the Private Practice website - the Researcher's Blog. It includes notes and thoughts on each episode in terms of the medicine/science behind the show, ethical implications of the plot, etc. I wasn't expecting that, and I'm curious what kind of traffic that blog generates.

In terms of the survey my list currently includes:

• Grey's Anatomy
• House
• Discovery Health
• Scrubs
• Private Practice
• ER
• Nip/Tuck
• Law and Order: SVU
• General Hospital

To anyone out there, am I missing any shows that should be on this list? Those seemed to be the biggies on some of the major networks, but I'm sure I'm missing something still.

This American Life: Ruining It for the Rest of Us

Sooner or later I'll stop posting stuff related to vaccines, but lately it seems that's where all the interesting stuff is going on... For those that don't regularly listen to This American Life, it's a great show on NPR featuring a couple stories each week (normally three or four) on a particular theme. In late December they had a couple stories based around the theme of Ruining It for the Rest of Us. One of the segments was about San Diego parents that did (or didn't) have their children vaccinated for measles.

I have to wonder if this is where last week's episode of Private Practice came from, these parents in San Diego... Perhaps with a couple of media outlets tackling this we'll start to see more and more of the vaccine debate working its way into the mass media? Agenda setting at work...

Private Practice, Vaccines, and Measles - Oh My!

And we're back from the holiday break...

I was catching up on episodes of a couple shows last night, and one of them was last week's episode of Private Practice. Originally I was planning on half watching the show and half getting caught up on e-mail. A couple minutes into the show, though, I knew that wasn't going to be happening - because Private Practice apparently decided to mix things up a bit and tackle vaccines and autism.

(If you want to watch this episode it's on ABC's website here. Spoiler alert going forward...)

The short plot summary is that the mom decided not to have her two younger children immunized after the oldest one developed autism. The middle son ends up with measles, and the doctor wants to immunize the youngest son. The mom is refusing the vaccine, eventually the doctor vaccinates the youngest son against her wishes, and the middle son ends up dying. Yikes.

The only thing that could have probably made this more interesting would have been if this was the season finale, so everyone on both sides of the vaccines-autism debate could have argued all summer long. Alas. If there is one issue that (to me) would be interesting to track over time, in terms of the public's knowledge and attitudes, this would be the one. Perhaps a research project to come...

And kudos to the Private Practice folk for doing a nice job tackling a tough issue.