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Abstract
Background: Consumer health informatics (CHI) is an emerging field that utilizes technology to provide health information to enhance health-care decision making by the public. There is, however, no widely accepted or uniform definition of CHI. A consensus definition would be important for pedagogical reasons, to build capacity and to reduce confusion about what the discipline consists of.
Aim: We undertook a systematic review of published definitions of CHI and evaluated them using five quality assessment criteria and measures of similarity.
Methods: Five databases were searched (Embase, Web of Science, MEDLINE, CINAHL and Business Source Complete) resulting in 1101 citations. Twenty-three studies met the inclusion criteria. Definitions were appraised using five criteria (with each scoring out of one): use of published citation, multi-disciplinarity, journal impact, definition comprehensibility, text readability.
Results: Most definitions scored low on citation (Mean ± SD: 0.22 ± 0.42), multi-disciplinarity (0.15 ± 0.28) and readability (0.04 ± 0.21) and somewhat higher on IF (0.35 ± 0.45) and definition comprehensibility (idea density) (0.87 ± 0.34) criteria. Overall, the quality of the published definitions was low 1.63 ± 0.80 (out of five).
Conclusions: The definitions of CHI were variable in terms of the quality assessment criteria. This suggests the need for continued discussion amongst consumer health informaticians to develop a clear consensus definition about CHI.
Declaration of Interest
One of the definitions reviewed was from an article published by two of the contributing authors. We attempted to minimize bias by having the remaining (non-contributing) author do all of the evaluations and by having a secondary party grade a random sample.