Terminology of Health communication

Accuracy: Content that is valid and without errors of fact, interpretation, or judgment.
Advocacy: Communication directed at policymakers and decisionmakers to promote policies, regulations, and programs to bring about change.
Availability: Content (whether a targeted message or other information) that is delivered or placed where the audience can access it. Placement varies according to audience, message complexity, and purpose—from interpersonal and social networks to billboards, mass transit signs, prime-time TV, and radio and from public kiosks (print or electronic) to the Internet.
Balance: Where appropriate, content that fairly and accurately presents the benefits and risks of potential actions or recognizes different and valid perspectives on an issue.
Consistency: Content that remains internally consistent over time and also is consistent with information from other sources.
Consumer health informatics: Interactive health communication (see below) focusing on consumers.
Consumer health information: Information designed to help individuals understand their health and make health-related decisions for themselves and their families.
Cultural competence: The design, implementation, and evaluation process that accounts for special issues of select population groups (ethnic and racial, linguistic) as well as differing educational levels and physical abilities.
Decision support systems: Computer software programs designed to assist diagnostic and treatment decisions. Examples include drug alert notification systems, prompts to implement practice guidelines, and health risk appraisals.
Evidence base: Relevant scientific evidence that has undergone comprehensive review and rigorous analysis to formulate practice guidelines, performance measures, review criteria, and technology assessments for telehealth applications.
Formative research: Assesses the nature of the problem, the needs of the target audience, and the implementation process to inform and improve program design. Formative research is conducted both prior to and during program development to adapt the program to audience needs. Common methods include literature reviews, reviews of existing programs, and surveys, interviews, and focus group discussions with members of the target audience.
Health communication: The art and technique of informing, influencing, and motivating individual, institutional, and public audiences about important health issues. The scope of health communication includes disease prevention, health promotion, health care policy, and the business of health care as well as enhancement of the quality of life and health of individuals within the community.
Health education: Any planned combination of learning experiences designed to predispose, enable, and reinforce voluntary behavior conducive to health in individuals, groups, or communities.
Health literacy: The degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.
Health promotion: Any planned combination of educational, political, regulatory, and organizational supports for actions and conditions of living conducive to the health of individuals, groups, or communities.
Interactive health communication:The interaction of an individual with an electronic device or communication technology to access or transmit health information or to receive guidance on a health-related issue.
Internet: A worldwide interconnection of computer networks operated by government, commercial, and academic organizations and private citizens.
Literacy: The ability to read, write, and speak in English and to compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job and in society, to achieve one’s goals, and develop one’s knowledge and potential
Medical informatics: A field of study concerned with the broad range of issues in the management and use of biomedical information, including medical computing and the study of the nature of medical information itself.
Outcome evaluation (sometimes called impact evaluation): Examines the results of a communication intervention, including changes in awareness, attitudes, beliefs, actions, professional practices, policies, costs, and institutional or social systems.
Patient communication: Information for individuals with health conditions to help them maximize recovery, maintain therapeutic regimens, and understand alternative approaches. Patient communication includes educational resources, provider-patient communication, and, increasingly, peer-to-peer communication.
Process evaluation: Monitors the administrative, organizational, or other operational characteristics of an intervention. Process evaluation includes monitoring the dissemination of communication products to intended users (whether gatekeepers or audiences) and audience members’ exposure to a message. For an interactive health communication application, process evaluation may include testing how the application functions.
Reach: Information that gets to or is available to the largest possible number of people in the target population.
Reliability: Content that is credible in terms of its source and is kept up to date.
Repetition: Delivery of and access to content continued or repeated over time, both to reinforce the impact with a given audience and to reach new generations.
Risk communication: Engaging communities in discussions about environmental and other health risks and about approaches to deal with them. Risk communication also includes individual counseling about genetic risks and consequent choices.
Social marketing: The application of marketing principles and techniques to program development, implementation, and evaluation to promote healthy behaviors or reduce risky ones.
Tailoring: Creating messages and materials to reach one specific person based on characteristics unique to that person, related to the outcome of interest, and derived from an assessment of that individual.
Targeting: Creating messages and materials intended to reach a specific segment of a population, usually based on one or more demographic or other characteristics shared by its members.
Tele-health: The application of telecommunication and computer technologies to the broad spectrum of public health, medicine, and health.
Telemedicine: The use of electronic information and communication technologies to provide clinical care across distance.
Timeliness: Content that is provided or available when the audience is most receptive to, or in need of, the specific information.
Underserved: Individuals or groups who lack access to health services or information relative to the national average. The underserved population may include residents of rural, remote, or inner-city areas; members of certain racial and ethnic groups; socio-economically disadvantaged persons; or people with disabilities.
Understandability: Reading or language level and format (including multimedia) appropriate for a specific audience.World Wide Web (Web): An international virtual network composed of Internet host computers that can be accessed by graphical browsers.