Consumer Informatics and Digital Health

Book excerpt: This unique collection synthesizes insights and evidence from innovators in consumer informatics and highlights the technical, behavioral, social, and policy issues driving digital health today and in the foreseeable future. Consumer Informatics and Digital Health presents the fundamentals of mobile health, reviews the evidence for consumer technology as a driver of health behavior change, and examines user experience and real-world technology design challenges and successes. Additionally, it identifies key considerations for successfully engaging consumers in their own care, considers the ethics of using personal health information in research, and outlines implications for health system redesign. The editors’ integrative systems approach heralds a future of technological advances tempered by best practices drawn from today’s critical policy goals of patient engagement, community health promotion, and health equity. Here’s the inside view of consumer health informatics and key digital fields that students and professionals will find inspiring, informative, and thought-provoking. Included among the topics: • Healthcare social media for consumer informatics • Understanding usability, accessibility, and human-centered design principles • Understanding the fundamentals of design for motivation and behavior change • Digital tools for parents: innovations in pediatric urgent care • Behavioral medicine and informatics in the cancer community • Content strategy: writing for health consumers on the web • Open science and the future of data analytics • Digital approaches to engage consumers in value-based purchasing Consumer Informatics and Digital Health takes an expansive view of the fields influencing consumer informatics and offers practical case-based guidance for a broad range of audiences, including students, educators, researchers, journalists, and policymakers interested in biomedical informatics, mobile health, information science, and population health. It has as much to offer readers in clinical fields such as medicine, nursing, and psychology as it does to those engaged in digital pursuits.