Summary
Objectives To illustrate how access to health information is a key determinant to the strengthening
of health and healthcare systems, and highlight related current challenges of the
evolving knowledge society.
MethodsReflections on some of the dimensions of access to health information, with a focus
on current evolutions of the World-Wide-Web, unresolved issues and research perspectives.
Conclusion Our knowledge society is growing, maturing, and bringing powerful tools that can
improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of healthcare processes and help citizens
manage their health. However, many obstacles and challenges are still facing us. These
include our ability to manage information and knowledge rather than data, produce
decision-support tools with contents and ergonomics that effectively change behaviors,
orient information users in the ever-growing jungle of the social World-Wide-Web,
learn how to make sense and enable knowledge discovery in the huge and increasingly
connected biomedical data repositories, and bridge the digital divides that exist
within communities and across the world.
Keywords
Information society - information retrieval - social web - semantic web - globalization
- patient empowerment
