The use of online health resources and information among baby boomers in three nations

The importance of health literacy is well recognized. The American Medical Association, for example, found health literacy has a stronger impact on health status than a number of sociodemographic variables, and is crucial in empowering patients to play a more active role in their own healthcare. Health literacy is considered to have a major impact on health behaviors, decision-making, and outcomes, including both individual health and healthcare costs. Health information is one of the most frequently sought topics on the Internet, and in today’s networked environment, electronic health resources are becoming increasingly vital in terms of overall health literacy. New technologies that open up a myriad of eHealth applications and communications channels are revolutionizing the ways in which health information is accessed and used by both providers and patients. Hence the concept of eHealth literacy, which is an individual’s ability to find, evaluate, and apply health information from electronic sources, is a crucial area of study in order to understand and enhance the ways in which patients access and use eHealth information. This chapter details a study into the use of online health resources and levels of eHealth literacy among random samples of 996 Baby Boomers from the US, UK, and New Zealand (NZ). The choice of countries emerged from consideration of their very different rankings on healthcare system performance measures and their systems of healthcare provision, in the expectation that patients experiencing these different levels of services, choice, and standards would have different eHealth behaviors. These different eHealth behaviors are profiled and compared. The implications of these findings for health promotion and education, and healthcare service design and delivery to Baby Boomers consumers are discussed.