eHealth literacy research—Quo vadis?

ABSTRACT

The concept of electronic health (eHealth) literacy evolved from the social and information sciences and describes competencies necessary to use electronic health services. As it is a rather new topic, and as there is no current overview of the state of the art in research, it is not possible to identify research gaps. Therefore, the objective of this viewpoint article is to increase knowledge on the current state of the art of research in eHealth literacy and to identify gaps in scientific research which should be focused on by the research community in the future. The article provides a current viewpoint of the concept of eHealth literacy and related research. Gaps can be found in terms of a missing “gold standard” regarding both the definition and the measurement of eHealth literacy. Furthermore, there is a need for identifying the implications on eHealth developers, which evolve from the measurement of eHealth literacy in eHealth users. Finally, a stronger inclusion of health professionals, both in the evolving concept and in the measurement of eHealth literacy, is needed in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• eHealth Literacy
• Health Literacy
• Technology Acceptance
• Viewpoint

Acknowledgments

The present work was performed in partial fulfillment of the requirements for obtaining the degree “Dr. rer. biol. hum.”

Funding

We acknowledge support by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) within the funding program Open Access Publishing.

Conflicts of Interest

We have read and understood the policy on the declaration of interests of Informatics for Health and Social Care and declare that we have no competing interests.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge support by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) within the funding program Open Access Publishing.

Notes on contributors

Lena Griebel

LG, HE, HG, ALP, and JM work together in an international research group on eHealth literacy. For this article, they all provided their expertise and knowledge on eHealth literacy. LG carried out the writing of the manuscript, HE, HG, ALP, and JM commented intensely and provided further aspects and text pieces. MS supervised the work and provided the initial idea to write a viewpoint paper on eHealth literacy.