OBJECTIVES

: In relation to patient-centred care and digital health, the association between health literacy, eHealth-literacy (EHL) and shared decision-making (SDM) have been demonstrated. We evaluated the association between these concepts and health risk behaviours (HRBs) in the Hungarian general population.

METHODS

: We applied the Hungarian eHealth Literacy Scale (eHEALS) and the 9-item Shared Decision Making Questionnaire (SDM-Q-9) on an online sample representative of the general adult population in terms of age, gender, education and geographic region. We recorded HRBs, such as BMI ≥25, smoking, alcohol consumption ≥3 times a week, lack of exercise, non-participation at any health screening over the past 12 months, and self-reported health from the Minimal European Health Module (MEHM). We summed the number of HRBs, as a composite risk score. After controlling for age, gender, education and self-reported health, we tested the main effects as well as the interaction of EHL and SDM on the individual HRBs via logistic regression, and on the composite risk score via OLS regression.

RESULTS

: From the 1000 respondents, 537 participated in a health-related decision in the past 6 months in primary (n=221, 39.3%), specialised (n=320, 59.6%) or other (n=6, 0.9%) care setting, and provided reliable SDM-Q-9 and eHEALS scores. Mean age was 46.3 years (range: 18-90), 28% of respondents were ≥65 years old, 54% were female, 36% and 30% had secondary and tertiary education, respectively. We found significant association between EHL and SDM and health screening participation, but not with other HRBs. EHL and SDM showed weak correlation (r=0.09, p=0.035) and we found no significant interaction between EHL and SDM when predicting HRBs.

CONCLUSIONS

: Greater EHL and SDM are associated with higher probability of participating at health screenings in an online sample of the Hungarian general population. The population-health and economic consequences of these findings are yet to be determined.