Online health communities have emerged as an alternative source of information for individuals seeking medical information.  The continued growth of these communities is highly dependent on the willingness of their members to contribute their knowledge to the community, knowledge in the form of their personal health information.  The inherently sensitive nature of personal health information coupled with the continued success of online health communities presents an inherent paradox.  My research seeks to explain this paradox by exploring the factors which allow individuals to overcome their health information privacy concerns when sharing their personal health information in online health communities.

In my presentation I will discuss a proposed model for explaining knowledge contribution in online health communities as well as planned research to evaluate the effectiveness of the model.