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Objective: Remote Area Medical (RAM) Volunteer Corps is a nonprofit volunteer relief corps dedicated to serving mankind by providing free health care, dental care, eye care, and technical and educational assistance to people in remote areas of the United States and the world. The East Tennessee State University Medical Library participated in two RAM expeditions. Approximately 3,000 patients were seen at the 2 events. Methods: The library obtained funding to purchase laptops and printers and printed consumer health information. The library had a prominent position in the educational section of the events. Librarians from other medical libraries and public libraries were invited to be part of the team. During the event, library staff aggressively sought out opportunities to give consumer health information to patients. Results: The library provided health information to approximately 1,300 of the participants. Conclusions: RAM provided the library with a chance to really help out with the community. It was an interesting eye opening experience. It is the medical library’s wish to have a continued relationship with RAM. The library's presence made an impression on the various health care providers as to what a powerful tool information could be.

Objective: To enable primarily public libraries and secondarily public health workers and rural hospital staff to be consumer health information providers with the goal of creating a program that could be copied nationally, enabling public library workers to become an important resource in reversing our national health information illiteracy. Setting: Three regions of the state regional public library system covering seventeen counties and two regions of the state public health department system. Participants: Public library staff, public health department staff, and rural hospital staff. Program: East Tennessee State University (ETSU) College of Medicine Library partnered with public libraries to improve the delivery of health information. Four free classes were taught multiple times: “Prescription for Success,” “An Apple a Day,” “PubMed for Public Librarians,” and “From Snake Oil to Penicillin.” Regional public library directors were used to convince their staff of its value and obtain the concurrence of their boards for release time for class attendance. Classes were also developed for the public health workforce and rural hospital staff. Existing classes (with all teaching materials on the National Network of Libraries of Medicine [NN/ LM] Website) were used with the existing public library system. Results: Five-hundred thirty-three students attended the classes. Fifty-two public library workers received MLA’s Consumer Health Information Specialist certification. Thirty-one public libraries have joined NN/LM. All ordered MedlinePlus marketing materials for their libraries from InformationRx.org. Conclusion: This project helped address the public health problem of health information illiteracy by filling the gap the average person has in finding quality health information. A strength of this project is its easy replication. The project used materials that were readily available and put them to use. Any library could replicate this project in its own service area saving time and cost to the library.

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This study investigates the perspectives of healthcare professionals regarding the integration of consumer health applications and patient-generated data into healthcare practices. Through semi-structured interviews with five healthcare professionals from different regions in Sweden, this thesis explores key features that are most valuable to health professionals in enhancing health personnel-patient collaboration as well as how patient-generated data from self-tracking applications can be best integrated into healthcare practices towards achieving health goals. The findings reveal a positive attitude towards these applications, with healthcare professionals recognizing their value in promoting patient engagement, facilitating data-driven decision-making, and enhancing collaboration between patients and providers. However, concerns regarding data reliability, privacy, and the need for seamless integration into existing workflows are highlighted. The study contributes to the understanding of healthcare professionals' perspectives and provides insights into the design and potential adoption and effective implementation of consumer health applications in healthcare settings.

Consumers face several challenges using the Internet to fill health-related needs. (1) In many cases, they face a language gap as they look for information that is written in unfamiliar technical language. (2) Medical information in social media is of variable quality and may be appealing even when it is dangerous. (3) Discussion groups provide valuable social support for necessary lifestyle changes, but are variable in their levels of activity. (4) Finding less popular groups is tedious. We present solutions to these challenges. We use a novel adaptation of topic models to address the language gap. Conventional topic models discover a set of unrelated topics that together explain the combinations of words in a collection of documents. We add additional structure that provides relationships between topics corresponding to relationships between consumer and technical medical topics. This allows us to support search for technical information using informal consumer medical questions. We also analyze social media related to eating disorders. A third of these videos promote eating disorders and consumers are twice as engaged by these dangerous videos. We study the interactions of two communities in a photo-sharing site. There, a community that encourages recovery from eating disorders interacts with the pro-eating disorder community in an attempt to persuade them, but we found that this attempt entrenches the pro-eating disorder community more firmly in its position. We study the process by which consumers participate in discussion groups in an online diabetes community. We develop novel event history analysis techniques to identify the characteristics of groups in a diabetes community that are correlated with consumer activity. This analysis reveals that uniformly advertise the popular groups to all consumers impairs the diversity of the groups and limits their value to the community. To help consumers find interesting discussion groups, we develop a system for personalized recommendation for social connections. We extend matrix factorization techniques that are effective for product recommendation so that they become suitable for implicit power-law-distributed social ratings. We identify the best approaches for recommendation of a variety of social connections involving consumers, discussion groups and discussions.

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