As health care is moving toward a team effort with patients as partners, this book provides guidance on the optimized use of health information and supporting technologies, and how people think and make decisions that affect their health and wellbeing. It focuses on investigations of how general public understand health information, assess risky behaviors, make healthcare decisions, and how they use health information technologies.

e-health technologies have opened up new horizons for promoting increased self-reliance in patients. Although information technologies are now in widespread use, there is often a disparity between the scientific and technological knowledge underlying health care practices and the cultural beliefs, mental models, and cognitive representations of illness and disease. Misconceptions based on inaccurate perceptions and mental models, and flawed prior beliefs could lead to miscommunication as well as to erroneous decisions about individuals’ own health or the health of their family members.

Cognitive Informatics in Health and Biomedicine: Understanding and Modeling Health Behaviors presents state of the art research in cognitive informatics for assessing the impact of patient behaviour. It is designed to assist all involved at the intersection of the health care institution and the patient and covers contributions from recognized researchers and leaders in the field.