In the present era of information explosion and media influence, these advertisements play a major role in changing the settled perception or thinking, which is otherwise called attitude, of the consumer and also the consumption pattern of the society in general. Across the world, celebrities have been used for a wide variety of brands. The crescendo of celebrities endorsing brands has been ste...

This article addresses issues surrounding the provision of consumer health information in public libraries. Barriers to the use of public libraries by health care consumers are explored. Once a person has decided to try the public library as an avenue for searching for health information, interactions with library staff may still pose some challenges, both for the library user and for the libra...

Internet has become a major source of health information but medical information retrieval remains difficult for both the health professional and the patients. In this poster we describe CISMeF-patients which is a sub-part of CISMeF, a structured quality-controlled subject gateway. CISMeF-patients has been designed for the patients, their families and the general public who are often unfamiliar...

Iowa City Public Library recently completed an eighteen-month consumer health project entitled Expanding Access to Consumer Health Electronic Resources in Iowa City and Rural Johnson County, Iowa. This project included health-related computer classes, demonstrations, and programs and was funded by the National Library of Medicine through a subcontract with the National Network of Libraries of M...

OBJECTIVES This paper presents a method of cross-language information retrieval aiming to make medical information available to patients in French and English, regardless of the query language they wish to use. METHODS We describe the two MeSH-related terminologies used in this work. We show that the French patient synonyms included in CISMeF can be automatically mapped to the English consume...

The role of information in facilitating choice in a competitive health care marketplace is clearly pivotal, but it is also complex and occasionally problematic. Although it is clear that information is critical to the competitive approach, less clear is the relationship between the availability of appropriate information and the exercise of informed choice, a relationship that is obscured in th...

Consumer health information written by health care professionals is often inaccessible to the consumers it is written for. Traditional readability formulas examine syntactic features like sentence length and number of syllables, ignoring the target audience’s grasp of the words themselves. The use of specialized vocabulary disrupts the understanding of patients with low reading skills, causing ...

BACKGROUND Consumer Medicine Information (CMI) is a brand-specific and standardized source of written medicine information available in Australia for all prescription medicines. Side-effect information is poorly presented in CMI and may not adequately address consumer information needs. OBJECTIVE To explore consumer opinions on (i) the presentation of side-effect information in existing Austr...

This paper reports marketplace developments for consumer-driven health plans in spring 2002. Findings are from interviews with executives from start-up and health insurance firms, benefit consultants, employee benefit managers, Wall Street analysts, consumer organizations, thought leaders, and policymakers. We detail available evidence about the performance of consumer-driven health plans conce...

PURPOSE To test the hypothesis that a health maintenance organization (HMO) consumer's satisfaction depends on the way his or her health plan compensates practitioners. DESIGN Consumer Assessment of Health Plans (CAHPS) survey data from 1999 and 2000 were provided by the Office of Public Insurance Counsel for the state of Texas. These data were combined with the Health Plan Employer Data and ...