Chan, CV; Kaufman, DR.  “A framework for characterizing eHealth literacy demands and barriers.”  Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2011. 13(4): e94.

Researchers from Columbia University have developed a matrix of literacy types and cognitive complexity levels that can be used to assess an individuals’ eHealth competence and develop eHealth curricula.  This tool can also be used to design and evaluate eHealth resources.  eHealth literacy is defined as “a set of skills and knowledge that are essential for productive interactions with technology-based health tools.”  The authors’ objectives were to understand the core skills and knowledge needed to use eHealth resources effectively, and develop a set of methods for analyzing eHealth literacy.  They adapted Norman and Skinner’s eHealth literacy model to characterize six components of eHealth literacy:

1. Computer literacy
2. Information literacy
3. Media literacy
4. Traditional literacy
5. Science literacy
6. Health literacy

The authors used Amer’s revision of Bloom’s cognitive processes taxonomy to classify six cognitive process dimensions, ranked in order of increasing complexity:

1. Remembering
2. Understanding
3. Applying
4. Analyzing
5. Evaluating
6. Creating

They used the resulting matrix to characterize demands of eHealth tasks (Table 3) and describe an individuals’ performance on one of the tasks (Table 5), with a cognitive task analysis coding scheme based on the 6 cognitive process dimensions.