Chairperson
Mary Gardiner Jones, LLD, President, Alliance for Public Technology,
and Consumer Interest Research Institute
Panelists
Steve Snow, Charlotte’s Web, Charlotte, North Carolina
Lois Steele, Indian Health Service
Kenneth Chapman, National Trust for Development of Black Afro-American Men
Jeffrey Finn, Executive Director, SPRY Foundation
STATEMENT OF THE SUBJECT
This panel dealt with community access to health information, using the term health in its most
comprehensive sense as embracing both personal health, defined in terms of wellness, prevention,
and the management of chronic conditions in the home and community-based facilities, and
community health, defined as the social, economic, and environmental factors in a community,
which impact personal health.
Emphasis is directed towards developing health information to reach individuals, consumers,
patients, and caregivers in the home, clinic, and community facility, wherever their health-related decisions are made.
Increased knowledge of how individuals learn and are motivated to learn has focused attention on delivering health information to broaden the range of media (visual, audio, and text), on the use of interactivity, and on extending the sources of information to include social service providers, community organizations, and the use of peers.
KEY ISSUES, INCLUDING THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY
How do we develop the network infrastructure capable of carrying the new media and of reaching individuals in their homes? How do we develop the interactive tools to enable individuals to access the information they want in the most effective manner, in the format appropriate to their learning style and in the cultural and ethnic language of their choice? How do we motivate and create incentives for the development of the networks and data bases relating to the personal and community health which respond to the needs and desires of individuals? How do we provide affordable access to individuals to the information they want?
ROLES, RESPONSIBILITIES, AND PRIORITIES OF KEY SECTORS
Panelists discussed how they have developed communications channels and data in their communities to communicate health care information to their constituents.
Panelists were be asked to evaluate these channels against their sense of the needs of their constituents for personal and community health data in the interactive visual, textual, and audio formats and cultural languages, which would be most conducive to motivation and learning of their constituents.