title: What is consumer health informatics? A systematic review of published definitions.
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.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  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.
authors.affiliation: School of Public Health and Health Systems, University of Waterloo , Waterloo, Ontario , Canada.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Flaherty
authors.forename: Laurie
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Hoffman-Goetz
authors.forename: Jose F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Arocha
mesh_terms: D054626:Consumer Health Information / Q000592:standards* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D057220:Health Literacy; D006801:Humans; D055811:Journal Impact Factor; D012660:Semantics
keywords: Consumer; definitions; health informatics; medical informatics; systematic review