title: Health literacy and patient portals.
abstract: Health literacy has been described as the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions. Improving health literacy may serve to promote concordance with therapy, engage patients in their own health care, and improve health outcomes. Patient portal technology aims at enabling patients and families to have easy access to key information in their own medical records and to communicate with their health care providers electronically. However, there is a gap in our understanding of how portals will improve patient outcome. The authors believe patient portal technology presents an opportunity to improve patient concordance with prescribed therapy, if adequate support is provided to equip patients (and family/carers) with the knowledge needed to utilise the health information available via the portals. Research is needed to understand what a health consumer will use patient portals for and how to support a user to realise the technology's potential.
authors.affiliation: National Institute for Health Innovation, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. h.gu@auckland.ac.nz.
authors.forename: Yulong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Gu
authors.affiliation: National Institute for Health Innovation, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Orr
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Jim
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Warren
mesh_terms: D022126:Access to Information; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D057220:Health Literacy; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D009520:New Zealand; D033283:Patient Access to Records; D010349:Patient Compliance; D010353:Patient Education as Topic; D014584:User-Computer Interface