Digital health literacy as a super determinant of health: More than simply the sum of its parts
Open accessAbstract
•Civic literacy refers to the ability to engage meaningfully with one's community.•Digital, health, and civic literacy are key predictors for digital health literacy.•The extent to which these three affect digital health literacy remains unclear.•Building digital health literacy is vital to limit inequalities from expanding.
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Digital health literacy has been related to better health outcomes, treatment adherence, motivation, adaptive health behaviors, and higher trust in healthcare providers.
“It has been related to better health outcomes, treatment adherence, motivation, adaptive health behaviors, and higher trust in healthcare providers (van Kessel et al., 2022).”
From Sociodemographics and Digital Health Literacy in Using Wearables for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention: Cross-Sectional Nationwide Survey in Germany (2025) · cites this paper as van Kessel et al., 2022
In the paper’s main text (indexed under Abstract; page unavailable), digital health literacy is described as important for achieving health and well-being, and improving it is suggested as a way to address lack of trust in digital health services. That offers broad support for the health-outcomes portion, but the paper does not report the claimed links to treatment adherence, motivation, or adaptive health behaviors; its discussion of trust concerns digital services, not healthcare providers. (LLM, conf=0.82)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredOf the 149 participants who took part in both rounds, 63 (42.6%) were based in high-income countries and 19 (12.8%) in low-income countries.
“Of those who took part in both rounds (149 participants), 63 (42.6%) were based in high-income countries and 19 (12.8%) in low-income countries (World Bank country income classification).54”
From The Digital Health Competencies in Medical Education Framework (2025) · cites this paper as [54]
The Data availability section says no data were generated for this article, and the passages retrieved from our copy do not report participants taking part in two rounds. Searches for the participant counts and the World Bank income classifications found no passage supporting the stated figures. (LLM, conf=0.74)
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Cites
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“Nowadays, digital literacy is becoming increasingly important to the point where it can be regarded as a fundamental pre-requisite for meaningfully participating in modern society (Sieck et al., 2021; Scheerder et al., 2017).”
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- Authors
- van Kessel, R., Wong, B. L. H., Clemens, T., & Brand, H.
- Affiliations
- World Health Organization (CH)
- Maastricht University (NL)
- Manipal Academy of Higher Education (IN)
- Venue
- Internet Interventions
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2022-03
- Volume
- 27
- Pages
- 100500
- ISSN
- 2214-7829 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8861384
- OpenAlex
- W4210299011
- Cited by
- 358
- References
- 14
- Citations by year
- 2026: 102 · 2025: 111 · 2024: 74 · 2023: 55 · 2022: 16
- FWCI
- 73.48
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Internet Interventions (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Research Publications (Maastricht University) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Research Publications (Maastricht University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Funders
- World Health Organization
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Health Literacy and Information Accessibility
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Digital literacy in education
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › ICT in Developing Communities
- Keywords
- digital health literacy, civic literacy, health literacy, digital literacy, health disparities, community participation
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