Appendix B_audience

Appendix B
Audiences for Data and Results

APPENDIX B
AUDIENCES FOR DATA AND RESULTS

B.1

Health Care Professionals
Recent articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association have suggested that there

has been a change in the ways in which health care providers communicate with patients. Many patients
go to their health appointments armed with information—some credible, some not so credible—that they
have downloaded from the World Wide Web. Others explain how they have been ordering herbal
supplements, and sometimes prescription pharmaceuticals, online. Health care providers will benefit
directly from information about how members of the general public are acquiring their health-related
information in order to accommodate their patients’ health information needs.

B.2

“Consumer Informatics” Specialists
Recent meetings of the American Medical Informatics Association have emphasized the

emergence of a new field in communication referred to as consumer informatics. With the emergence of a
better educated middle class, along with a broad dissemination of information technology, more and more
individuals are personally seeking out recommendations for health living. Consumer informatics
specialists are those responsible for publishing the information needed by consumers in easy-to-use and
accessible formats. Knowing how individuals acquire knowledge about cancer and cancer prevention
should enable consumer informatics professionals to make important decisions about channels (e.g.,
World Wide Web versus traditional broadcast media), what type of information to publish within those
channels, and how best to reach certain, especially minority, populations.

B.3

Public Health Professionals
Directors of public health departments throughout the country are constantly in the position

of making critical administrative and budgetary decisions about the number and format of effective public
service announcement campaigns. HINTS provides public health administrators with data on which to
base their communication decisions.

B-1

B.4

Behavioral and Communication Researchers
Much of the scientific knowledge that is underpinning public health campaigns has been

collected within traditional “broadcast media” domains. Given the failure of many commercial “dot-com”
health web sites, there is some reason to believe that some of the traditional behavioral communication
models, which were formulated during an age of one-way broadcast media, may not work as effectively
in a highly networked communication environment. New research is needed to inform the next generation
of behaviorally oriented communication theories.

B-2