We’ve all been there. Concerned about a rash. Starting a new medication. Or, possibly, just diagnosed with an unfamiliar disease.
What is one of the first things you do when you go home? Chances are your response is that you open your Internet browser and use Google to find out as much health information as possible. But how do you know if the information you discover is accurate, credible, relevant, and trustworthy? In many cases you (and many others like you) cannot tell for sure, so you continue to search. Before you know it, hours have gone by, and you still haven’t found good answers. Worse, you may have found information that’s inaccurate, outdated, or otherwise causes you unnecessary alarm.
In the quest for quality health information, healthcare professionals often face this same struggle. According to new research conducted in late 2011 by HealthEd On Demand, a part of the HealthEd Group, healthcare professionals -- specifically 99% of dietitians -- consider educational materials to be important or essential.
The survey highlighted that the Internet is a common source for educational materials and health information. Handouts, websites, books, pamphlets, and videos are now all available at the click of the mouse. However, evaluating quality as well as relevance (for instance, culturally appropriate, health literacy) for their patients can be tricky. To overcome this challenge, healthcare professionals often look to specific sources they can trust -- but even that involves combing through a lot of different resources, as illustrated in the survey results infographic snapshot below:
Further, the amount of time it takes healthcare professionals to find and organize materials is a clear frustration. This frustration is illustrated in the infographic snapshot below:
After all the time and effort searching for and evaluating quality education materials, it must be common to wonder, “Isn’t there a tool that can do all this work for us?” Healthcare professionals may even wish they had a tool that would help them know whether their patients are actually using those resources -- a tool that provides them a feedback loop so they know whether their time and effort educating patients is working.
Here at HealthEd, we also asked ourselves this question and immediately started brainstorming a solution. That’s why we’ve been developing a free tool to make it easy for healthcare providers to find, save and share quality health information with their patients and track their progress.
It’s called HealthEd On Demand: http://www.healthedondemand.com.
To learn more about the challenges we’re trying to address, you can check out the full infographic of the survey results at:
https://healthedondemand.com/HeodPages/Pages/Dietitians_Survey.htm.
We hope our new tool will save us all the time and frustration in searching for quality health information -- because we’ve all “been there.”
Laura Catalusci
Specialist, Health Education
