Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Dec 12, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 17, 2018 - Feb 11, 2019
Date Accepted: Aug 31, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Does health information on the Internet make you feel better or worse? Findings from the 7th population-based Tromsø Study, Part 3
ABSTRACT
Background:
E-health has been described as a “silver bullet” for addressing how the challenges of the current healthcare system may be solved by technological solutions in future strategies and visions for modern healthcare. However, the evidence of the effects on service quality and cost-effectiveness remains unclear. In addition, patients’ expectations and experiences of e-health tools and implications for their psychological and emotional wellbeing are rarely addressed by the scientific literature.
Objective:
To study how psychological and emotional wellbeing of e-health service users is affected by the use of e-health tools.
Methods:
Data from a population-based survey in Norway, representing 10,604 e-health users over 40 years old, was analyzed to identify how the use of e-health tools was associated with feeling anxious, confused, knowledgeable, or reassured. Associations between these four emotional outcomes and the use of four types of e-health services (web search engines, video search engines, health apps and social media) were analyzed using logistic regression models.
Results:
E-health tools made 72.41% of the participants feel more knowledgeable, and 47.49% more reassured about their health status. However, 25.69% reported to feel more anxious and 27.88% to be more confused by using e-health tools. A high level of education and having no full-time job were associated with positive experiences (feeling more knowledgeable and reassured), while low self-reported health status and not having enough friends who could provide help and support, predicted negative experiences (i.e. feeling anxious and confused).
Conclusions:
Positive emotional effects of e-health use (feeling knowledgeable and reassured) were relatively more prevalent among users over 40 years old, than negative emotional effects (i.e. feeling anxious and confused). However, about one fourth of e-health users reported to be more confused and anxious after using e-health services. This challenge should be addressed by e-health service providers.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.