Week 6: Consumer Health Informatics and e-health

This week my nursing informatics class discussed consumer health informatics and e-health.
One of the major themes that was discussed throughout the class was the concept of apomediation in the context of health care services. In class the term apomediation was defined as skipping the middleman and allowing patients to go directly to the source of information. I further explored the concept of apomediation in the assigned course article "Medicine 2.0: Social Networking, Collaboration, Participation, Apomediation, and Openness”. 

The article discusses the topic of apomediation as it relates to health care. According to Eysenbach, there are three ways in which health care consumers access information and services: 

1)      Health care providers directly giving information or providing health care services to a patient, or web portals that contain information only from health care experts. In this model the health care provider is viewed as the intermediary (or a middleman) between the patient and the information or service.

2)      In the second model the patient bypasses the middleman, in a process known as disintermediation, in order to access health care information or services. An example of this model is a patient searching for health information on the internet.

3)      The third way in which a patient can access health information is a subset of disintermediation known as apomediation. In the article Eysenback describes apomediation as people or tools which stand by to guide a consumer to high

quality information and services without being a prerequisite to obtain that information or service (Eysenback, 2008).

The article gives the following examples of apomediaries or apomediation tools:

·         Ratings in amazon.com or epinions.com

·         PICS or MedPICS labels (enable machine interpretation of user ratings)

·         Collaborative filtering and recommender systems (such as StumbleUpon.com)

·         second generation internet-based services and tools that let people collaborate on a massive scale and share information online

·         Social networking sites

·         Blogs

·         Wikis

References 
Eysenbach, G. (2008). Medicine 2.0: Social networking, collaboration, participation, 
apomediation, and openness. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 10(3), e22. 

doi:10.2196/jmir.1030