According to the Medical Library Association, Health Information Literacy is the “the set of abilities needed to: recognize a health information need, identify likely information sources and use them to retrieve relevant information, assess the quality of the information and its applicability to a specific situation, and analyze, understand, and use the information to make good health decisions.”1 Aside from basic literary, basic knowledge of health topics is important. In addition, health literacy includes numerical skills, such as those needed to determine cholesterol levels, calculate sugar levels, measure and administer medication, and read nutrition labels.2 “According to the Institute of Medicine, approximately one-half of the adult population may lack the needed literacy skills to use the U.S. healthcare system. Low literacy has been linked to poor health outcomes such as higher rates of hospitalization and less frequent use of preventive services. Both of these outcomes are associated with higher healthcare costs.”3 The National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) recently reported that only 33% of people with graduate degrees and 4% of high school graduates were health literate.4 Adults at highest risk for low health literacy rates are the elderly, minority populations, immigrant populations, low income populations, and people suffering from chronic illness.5
113 million adult internet users, which translates into 80% of all internet users, use web search engines to search for health information. Three-quarters of these searchers inconsistently check the quality of the information they find.6 “58% of those who found the internet to be crucial or important during a loved one’s recent health crisis say the single most important source of information was something they found online.”7 Women, internet users younger than 65, college graduates, those with more online experience, and those with broadband access were more likely to search for health information using the internet.8
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine suggests that users ask themselves the following ten questions in order to evaluate and determine credible health information websites from noncredible websites: “who runs this site, who pays for this site, what is the purpose of this site, where does the information come from, what is the basis of the information, how is the information selected, how current is the information, how does the site choose links to other sites, what information about you does the site collect, and why, and how does the site manage interactions with visitors.”9
