Today we continue looking at the driving forces that may be affecting the scenarios we will create. Last time we defined the question that provides a frame of reference for the scenarios: What will the workaday world of a clinical research informatician be like in the year 2015? In the last post, we looked at how information technology acts as a driving force. The topic for today will be information, which has undergone a kind of Cambrian Explosion as a result of the disruptive changes in information technology over the past sixty or so years.
For the medical professionals and informaticians among my readers, I assure you we will get to domain-specific driving forces in the near future. First, though, we want to make sure we understand the cross-cutting forces that shape the future of all domains to some degree. If not already apparent, the logic of this approach will become apparent over time.
A quick recap of the last post's take on information technology is in order. We
saw that it is by nature evolutionary, but every ten to twenty years it
produces a disruptive change. Examples we gave of disruptive changes
included the development of the computer in the 1940's, the transistor
in the 1950's, the integrated circuit in the early '70's, the personal
computer in the early 1980's, and the World Wide Web in the '90's. It seems very likely that the next eight years will see another sea change in IT. I started writing about this in my 2002 Rogue Wave scenario planning paper, which turned out to be an excellent planning document.
According to a 2003 study released by the UC Berkeley School of Information Management & Systems entitled How Much Information?, the amount of information publicly available on the Web today exceeds that found in print media by an enormous margin - in 2002, the Web contained roughly 170 terabytes of information, compared with 10 TB in the US Library of Congress Print Collection.
How influential is this information explosion, given an assumption that health information is proliferating along with everything else? For health professionals, I would assert that all it has done is make researching questions of fact or protocol easier than it has been in the past. Most health professionals already had access to far more information than they could absorb twenty years ago.
But what effect has this had on health information consumers? The information on the Web is known to be of varying quality, but as far back as 1999, consumers regarded the Web as a source of truth, according to a study by Biermann, Golladay, Greenfield, & Baker. A 2001 study by Cline & Haynes found that more than 50 million people sought health information online. Given the growth of the Web in intervening years, the number of seekers is much higher now. A 2006 report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project [PDF format] reported that 113 million Web users engaged in online searches for health information.
A growing body of research published in peer-reviewed journals has shown that in the view of medical professionals, the information on the Internet is of highly variable quality (e.g., Clark, 2002). Their skepticism is not shared by the online population; a 2005 Nielsen/NetRatings study cited in the journal Hospitals and Health Networks showed that the Internet is "…the most trusted media source for consumers... decisively outstripping offline media when they want credible health information… 42 percent trust or completely trust the information they find on the Internet, while only 18 percent and 16 percent trust what they find out through friends/family and offline media, respectively."
In the next post, we'll go deeper into this, and see what implications this may have for informaticians and for other health professionals. We'll also look at broader implications of the information explosion, though it may take more than one additional post to cover what needs to be said.
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