Access to life-saving health information: Not a luxury, a necessity
OpenForum | January 5, 2010 | 0 Comments
In India, a woman enters a village health center and accesses a web page for information on how to better care for her baby. In Boston, a doctor at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), one of the world’s most elite hospitals, pulls up the UpToDate website — an online medical information resource used by many clinicians to stay current with the latest clinical advances and practices — for information to help diagnose and treat a patient.
The World Wide Web has connected health care implementers with a vast sea of knowledge and experience. From mothers to doctors to architects to IT technicians to government policy makers, each of these actors faces daily challenges on how to deliver quality health care. Some are sitting in first-class hospitals in developed countries, while others are in isolated rural clinics in the poorest countries. Some are new to their role, while others have been in the field for as long as they can remember.
Unfortunately, many health care implementers are unable to access the information they need on the internet. Most online journals and medical information resources charge subscription service fees. Recognizing this financial barrier, there has been a strong drive to make access to scientific journals free for health care implementers in developing countries.
In 2002, the World Health Organization launched HINARI, a program to provide access to major scientific journals for public and non-profit institutions in developing countries. Other initiatives include the Global Information Full Text database and the Open Access movement by which some publishers, such as Biomed Central and PloS, make articles freely available on the internet.
However, there is no guarantee that the breadth of health implementers practicing in resource-limited settings are able to understand and utilize this new set of information — especially scholarly papers or resources not applicable to their point of care. Language barriers, computer and internet literacy issues, and information overload are a few other challenges that they face. The woman in the village may not necessarily be able to use the information she finds on the internet to improve her child’s health as “trying to get information from the Internet is like drinking from a fire hose.”
So how do health implementers access the most reliable, practical, and current information that is most applicable to their particular situation?
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