Tailored Educational Approaches for Consumer Health: A Model to Address Health Promotion in an Era of Personalized Medicine.

Purpose: To develop a model, based on market segmentation, to improve the quality and efficiency of health promotion materials and programs.

Design: Market segmentation to create segments (groups) based on a cross-sectional questionnaire measuring individual characteristics and preferences for health information. Educational and delivery recommendations developed for each group.

Using instructional design process to improve design and development of Internet interventions.

Given the wide reach and extensive capabilities of the Internet, it is increasingly being used to deliver comprehensive behavioral and mental health intervention and prevention programs. Their goals are to change user behavior, reduce unwanted complications or symptoms, and improve health status and health-related quality of life. Internet interventions have been found efficacious in addressing a wide range of behavioral and mental health problems, including insomnia, nicotine dependence, obesity, diabetes, depression, and anxiety.

Caring for the brain tumor patient: family caregiver burden and unmet needs.

The rapid onset and progression of a brain tumor, cognitive and behavioral changes, and uncertainty surrounding prognosis are issues well known to health practitioners in neuro-oncology. We studied the specific challenges that family caregivers face when caring for patients experiencing the significant neurocognitive and neurobehavioral disorders associated with brain tumors. We selected 25 family caregivers of adult brain tumor patients to represent the brain tumor illness trajectory (crisis, chronic, and terminal phases).

Tailored Educational Approaches for Consumer Health (TEACH): a model system for addressing health communication.

The Consumer Health Education Institute (CHEDI) has developed a model system to improve the quality and effectiveness of patient education and health communication. Through assessment of characteristics and preferences, segmentation into groups and matching with the appropriate materials, we have demonstrated that patients and health consumers have different health information needs and preferences which show promise as a basis for selecting or designing the most appropriate materials or programs.

Instructional design strategies for health behavior change.

To help health educators build upon the best of different health behavior change theories, this paper offers a unified set of instructional design strategies for health education interventions. This set draws upon the recommendations of Rosenstock (Health Belief Model), Bandura (Social Cognitive Theory), and Dearing (Diffusion Theory), and uses a modified Events of Instruction framework (adapted from Robert Gagne): gain attention (convey health threats and benefits), present stimulus material (tailor message to audience knowledge and values, demonstrate observable effectiveness, make behaviors easy-to-understand and do), provide guidance (use trustworthy models to demonstrate), elicit performance and provide feedback (to enhance trialability, develop proficiency and self-efficacy), enhance retention and transfer (provide social supports and deliver behavioral cues). Sample applications of these strategies are provided.

A user-centered model for web site design: needs assessment, user interface design, and rapid prototyping.

As the Internet continues to grow as a delivery medium for health information, the design of effective Web sites becomes increasingly important. In this paper, the authors provide an overview of one effective model for Web site design, a user-centered process that includes techniques for needs assessment, goal/task analysis, user interface design, and rapid prototyping. They detail how this approach was employed to design a family health history Web site, Health Heritage View Article and Find Full Text PDF