Health Evidence Application and Linkage Network - HEALNet

Making e-health interactive leads to better health for Canadians

Dr. Yuri Quintana, a HealNet-sponsored researcher, is a virtual storyteller. His "stories" – actually, the way he tells them – are making it easier for Canadian women to understand breast cancer information on the Internet, allowing them to make more informed decisions and giving them greater control over their lives.

Armed with a theory that interactive learning improves understanding, Dr. Quintana is creating Web sites that blend facts, storytelling, cultural factors and multimedia to create interactive consumer health Web sites that emphasize the "care" in healthcare. The sites are interactive in that they enable the user to "jump" from one place of the presentation to another, allowing in effect each user to customize the way information is presented.
"The big problem with health sites on the Internet is that there is a lot of information that is hard to understand," says Dr. Quintana, professor at the University of Western Ontario. "Bombarding people with facts alone doesn't help."

Dr. Quintana found that Internet search engines give preferential ranking to commercial Web sites, and that few links point to comprehensive sites. In addition, most sites are not reviewed by doctors, and the ones that are do not give patients much help in making decisions.

"Our research shows that using interactive sites that include audio and video components dramatically increases patients' understanding of the content," says Dr. Quintana.

"Interactive learning facilitates better understanding and retention of information," he adds. "And if patients are able to get some of these questions answered using the Internet, they may feel better prepared to make decisions about their treatment and surgery."

Last year, for example, Dr. Quintana developed an evidence-based Web site for the Canadian Cancer Society and Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto. Not only does the site help visitors understand the relevant medical information, it also provides them with interactive decision aids for surgical treatments in breast cancer.

Dr. Quintana expects that this technology will soon evolve to the point where full-fledged interactive video will be possible as a learning medium. "What hypertext did for documents, cross-linking interactivity will do for video," he says.

But there are challenges too. According to Dr. Quintana, the greatest challenge facing health informatics technology is merging creative content with what is technically possible given the nature of Internet service and connections around the world.

"What we need to focus on is how to get across our main messages in the most efficient way from a technical point of view, but also in a way that maximizes the creative impact, and usually those two are working in opposite directions."

These problems are not stopping Dr. Quintana, who sees the new technology as much more than a tool to acquire information.

"Using the Internet to learn about breast cancer helps a patient understand more, but it also gives her a sense of control over her life and her illness," he says.

When asked about the origin of the idea for this research, Dr. Quintana points to the Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, Colorado. "It had a big impact on my research. I realized that people are looking for hope and inspiration, and when they can associate a story with a live person-using interactive video and audio-it has a lot of meaning to them."

HealNet is one of 22 federally funded Networks of Centres of Excellence, the objectives of which are to enhance the Canadian economy and our quality of life. The program is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), in partnership with Industry Canada.

To learn more about Dr. Yuri Quintana, see www.yuriquintana.com and more about HealNet, visit http://healnet.mcmaster.ca.