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Purpose: Rural residents may have lower access to and use of certain health information sources relative to urban residents. We investigated differences in information source access and use between rural and urban US adults and whether having low health literacy might exacerbate rural disparities in access to and use of health information. Methods: Six hundred participants (50% rural) completed an online survey about access and use of 25 health information sources. We used logistic regression models to test associations between rurality and access to and use of health information sources and whether rurality interacted with health literacy to predict the access and use. Findings: Compared to urban residents, rural residents had lower access to health information from sources including primary care providers, specialist doctors, blogs, and magazines, and less use of search engines. After accounting for sociodemographics, rural residents only had lower access to specialist doctors than urban residents. Rural residents with limited health literacy had lower access to mass media and scientific literature but higher use of corporations/companies than rural residents with adequate health literacy and urban residents regardless of health literacy level. Conclusions: Some differences in access to and use of health information sources may be accounted for by sociodemographic differences between rural and urban populations. There may be structural barriers such as shortage of specialist doctors and limited media exposure that make it harder for rural residents to access health information, especially those with limited health literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Library of Medicine's (NLM) AIDS Community Information Outreach Program (ACIOP) was launched in 1994 to provide the HIV/AIDS affected community with access to vital health information resources increasingly becoming available on the Internet. Three hundred awards have been made mostly to community-based organizations. An evaluation in 2012 found that most program objectives are being met; a principal recommendation going forward was that NLM seek to enhance the capacity of community-based awardees to conduct evaluations of their own projects. This article reports on a workshop whose invitees were drawn from AIDS serving organizations, along with scientists, clinicians, and information technologists, to review the evaluation findings and recommendations. They considered alternatives for improving awardees’ evaluation capabilities with the help of expert consultation, identified additional steps that could be taken to make individual project results more transparent and sharable, and looked at external influences ranging from mobile health devices to the latest HIV/AIDS scientific research findings that could be used to align future awards with unmet needs in the community. The paper identifies efforts subsequently made by ACIOP managers to prioritize and operationalize guidance from the evaluation and the workshop, and discusses the benefits of community engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]