RATIONALE Policymakers want health information technology (health IT) to support consumer engagement to help achieve national health goals. In this paper, we review the evidence to compare the rhetoric with the reality of current practice. CURRENT REALITY AND BARRIERS Our environmental scan shows that consumer demand exists for electronic access to personal health information, but that techni...

Making consumer health information accessible to the public has enhanced and empowered lives. How do we know this is fact? This unique issue will look at the research to show how librarians have been the change agents who cultivate and maintain a web of relationships and resources needed to be advocates for consumer health information. There are many unique challenges that librarians face to im...

OBJECTIVE To provide an overview of the expansion in public access to electronic biomedical information over the past two decades, with an emphasis on developments to which the U.S. National Library of Medicine contributed. METHODS Review of the increasingly broad spectrum of web-accessible genomic data, biomedical literature, consumer health information, clinical trials data, and images. R...