Is Online Health Activity Alive and Well or Flatlining? Findings From 10 Years of the Health Information National Trends Survey.

The Internet increasingly enables diverse health communication activities, from information seeking to social media interaction. Up-to-date reporting is needed to document the national prevalence, trends, and user profiles of online health activities so that these technologies can be best used in health communication efforts. This study identifies prevalence, trend, and factors associated with seeking health information, e-mailing health care providers, and using social media for health purposes.

It takes a (virtual) village: crowdsourcing measurement consensus to advance survivorship care planning.

We report results from the use of an innovative tool (the Grid-Enabled Measures (GEM) database) to drive consensus on the use of measures evaluating the efficacy and implementation of survivorship care plans. The goal of this initiative was to increase the use of publicly available shared measures to enable comparability across studies. Between February and August 2012, research and practice communities populated the GEM platform with constructs and measures relevant to survivorship care planning, rated the measures, and provided qualitative feedback on the quality of the measures.

Cancer-Related Information Seeking Among Cancer Survivors: Trends Over a Decade (2003-2013).

The demonstrated benefits of information seeking for cancer patients, coupled with increases in information availability, underscore the importance of monitoring patient information seeking experiences over time. We compared information seeking among cancer survivors to those with a family history of cancer and those with no history of cancer. We identified characteristics associated with greater information seeking among cancer survivors, key sources of cancer-related information, and changes in information source use over time.

Meeting the healthy people 2020 goals: using the Health Information National Trends Survey to monitor progress on health communication objectives.

The Healthy People initiative outlines a comprehensive set of goals aimed at improving the nation's health and reducing health disparities. Health communication has been included as an explicit goal since the launch of Healthy People 2010. The Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) was established as a means of exploring how the changing information environment was affecting the public's health, and is therefore an ideal tool for monitoring key health communication objectives included in the Healthy People agenda.

Health information-seeking on behalf of others: characteristics of "surrogate seekers".

Understanding the behaviors of surrogate seekers (those who seek health information for others) may guide efforts to improve health information transmission. We used 2011-2012 data from the Health Information National Trends Survey to describe behaviors of online surrogate seekers. Respondents were asked about use of the Internet for surrogate-seeking over the prior 12 months.

Patient perceptions of electronic medical records use and ratings of care quality.

Purpose: Despite considerable potential for improving health care quality, adoption of new technologies, such as electronic medical records (EMRs), requires prudence, to ensure that such tools are designed, implemented, and used meaningfully to facilitate patient-centered communication and care processes, and better health outcomes. The association between patients' perceptions of health care provider use of EMRs and health care quality ratings was assessed.

Method: Data from two iterations of the Health Information National Trends Survey, fielded in 2011 and 2012, were pooled for these analyses.