iSchool doctoral candidate Lynette Gerido, assistant professor Dr. Zhe He, and their teammates in the eHealth Lab were recently published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, a top journal in health informatics and health service research. In this project, they conducted a secondary data analysis to understand the factors that are associated with patients’ interests in medical research.

Dr. He explains the project below:

“By 2035, older adults (65 years and over) are expected to outnumber children and will represent 78 million people in the U.S. population. As the aging population continues to grow, it is critical to reduce disparities in their representation in medical research. Our study aims to describe sociodemographic characteristics, health and information behaviors as factors that influence U.S. adults’ interest in engaging in medical research, beyond participation as study subjects. Nationally representative cross-sectional data from the 2014 Health Information National Trends Survey (N=3677) were analyzed. Patient interest in engaging in medical research was found to have a statistically significant association with age. We found that older Adults (≥65) expressed less interest in medical research than the other age groups. Regardless of age, the strongest correlation was found between interest in patient engagement in medical research and actively looking for health information (P<.0001). Respondents who did not seek health information were significantly less likely than those who did to be interested in patient engagement in medical research. As the aging population continues to grow, it is critical to reduce disparities in their representation in medical research. Interest in participatory research methods may reflect an opportunity for consumer health informatics technologies to improve representation of older adults in future medical research.”