E Health

EHealth literacy is defined as “the ability to seek, find, understand and appraise health information from electronic sources and apply knowledge gained to addressing or solving a health problem.According to this definition, EHealthencompasses six types of literacy: traditional (literacy and numeracy), information, media, health, computer, and scientific. Of these, media and computer literacies are unique to the Internet context, with EHealth media literacy being the awareness of media bias or perspective, the ability to discern both explicit and implicit meaning from media messages, and to derive meaning from media messages. Having the composite skills of EHealth allows health consumers to achieve positive outcomes from using the Internet for health purposes. EHealth has the potential to both protect consumers from harm and empower them to fully participate in informed health-related decision making.