BACKGROUND: Many clinicians and researchers are interested in patients of a specific age (childhood, geriatrics, and so on). Searching for age-specific publications in large bibliographic databases such as Medline is problematic because of inconsistencies in indexing, overlapping age categories, and the spread of the relevant literature over many journals. To our knowledge, no empirically tested age-specific search strategies exist for Medline. OBJECTIVE: We sought to determine the...

BACKGROUND: Online Web communication between physician and patient has been proposed by leading primary care organizations as a way to enhance physician-patient communication, but lack of payment for this service has acted as a significant barrier to implementation. OBJECTIVE: This study evaluates current patient readiness and willingness to pay for online services in a fairly typical urban family medicine practice. METHODS: All patients that visited the author for medical care during a...

BACKGROUND: Electronic health resources are helpful only when people are able to use them, yet there remain few tools available to assess consumers’ capacity for engaging in eHealth. Over 40% of US and Canadian adults have low basic literacy levels, suggesting that eHealth resources are likely to be inaccessible to large segments of the population. Using information technology for health requires eHealth literacy—the ability to read, use computers, search for information,...

BACKGROUND: With the growing adoption of electronic medical records, there are increasing demands for the use of this electronic clinical data in observational research. A frequent ethics board requirement for such secondary use of personal health information in observational research is that the data be de-identified. De-identification heuristics are provided in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Privacy Rule, funding agency and professional association privacy...

BACKGROUND: Advances in ubiquitous computing, smart homes, and sensor technologies enable novel, longitudinal health monitoring applications in the home. Many home monitoring technologies have been proposed to detect health crises, support aging-in-place, and improve medical care. Health professionals and potential end users in the lay public, however, sometimes question whether home health monitoring is justified given the cost and potential invasion of privacy. OBJECTIVE: The aim of the...

BACKGROUND: A real-time assessment of patients’ experiences is an important methodology for studies in health care, quality of life, behavioral sciences, and new drug and treatment development. Ecological momentary assessment is a methodology that allows for real-time assessment of experience and behavior in a subject’s natural environment. Recently, electronic data collection techniques have been introduced, including systems utilizing interactive voice response. OBJECTIVE:...

BACKGROUND: The provision of online counseling and online therapy is steadily increasing. The results of a number of controlled trials investigating the efficacy of online approaches indicate that some of these new treatment alternatives might indeed be effective. Yet, little is known about how the therapeutic relationship (or working alliance) evolves over the Internet and whether it influences treatment outcome as it does in traditional face-to-face therapy. The working alliance has been...