As alluded to in my previous blog, my interest in the healthcare information systems module was biased towards use of ICTs to benefit consumers and not the healthcare professionals. As it turns out, my area of interest is aptly called “Consumer Health Informatics“. According to Gunther Eysenbach , consumer health informatics can be defined as:

“…the branch of medical informatics that analyses consumers’ needs for information; studies and implements methods of making information accessible to consumers; and models and integrates consumers’ preferences into medical information systems. Consumer informatics stands at the crossroads of other disciplines, such as nursing informatics, public health, health promotion, health education, library science, and communication science, and is perhaps the most challenging and rapidly expanding field in medical informatics; it is paving the way for health care in the information age.”