HackHealth: Engaging youth in health-related information seeking, sharing, and use. Ignite talk delivered at the 2013 ASIS&T SIG-USE Symposium: Information Behavior on the Move: Information Needs, Seeking, and Use in the Era of Mobile Technologies, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. November 2, 2013.

Abstract: Over the past several decades, our conceptualization of health has gradually shifted from one that is primarily passive and state-based (i.e., one is either well or ill) to one that is more active and process-based (i.e., one is working toward preventing or managing disease), from physician-centric to patient-centric, and from treatment-focused to prevention-focused. Along with these shifts have come an increasing desire, need, and expectation for patients to actively engage in identifying their health-related information needs, seeking information to fulfill these needs, and putting this information to use to maintain and/or regain their health. As a result of these emerging trends, people’s information behaviors, their health behaviors, and the crucially important interdependencies between these two come to the fore as central areas of focus within both information behavior research and information professional practice