In The e-Health Landscape: A Terrain Map of Emerging Information and Communication Technologies in Health and Health Care, Thomas Eng defines ehealth as “the use of emerging information and communication technology, especially the Internet, to improve or enable health and health care.”  Now the questions that beg to be asked are: Is the world’s population able to take advantage of this relatively new lane in the information highway? and; Do we have the necessary eHealth literacy?

Cameron D Norman and Harvey A Skinner define the concept of eHealth literacy as ”the ability to seek, find, understand, and appraise health information from electronic sources and apply the knowledge gained to addressing or solving a health problem.” In their paper, eHealth Literacy: Essential Skills for Consumer Health in a Networked World, these authors present a  model of eHealth literacy made up of different literacy types, and identify what basics are needed to get the most out of eHealth tools.

As Norman and Skinner explain, electronic health tools provide little value if the intended users don’t possess the know-how to use them.  Recent statistics have North American adults reading at literacy level of approximately 50% of where it needs to be to interact within our text-message-laden environment.  Which, if looked at from an eHealth point of view, translates into half the targeted audience for health, ehealth and health related promotions missing the message, and health advantage opportunity.

Realistically, at a minimum, any individual looking to interact in a consumer-targeted eHealth environment needs at least access to and working knowledge of computers, fundamental reading and writing skills, and the ability to interpret the often scientific laden language used on online ehealth related sites.  And at this point in time it just isn’t clear that most of the population have these basics in their skill set.

So does that mean that eHealth initiatives are doomed?  Or that what already exists in cyberspace is a waste?  No.  What it means is that consumer targeted eHealth sites have to take it down a notch in technical terms and spell it out as clearly as possible, leaving the medical lingo to the medical profession targeted sites.  And look at it is that consumers want and would benefit the most from.  A good place to start would be sites that store EHR (electronic health records) sites that are secure and easy to manage, and condition-focused sites that use simple language and focus on providing information the patient needs, not what the doctors want to tell them.