Journal:What Is health information quality? Ethical dimension and perception by users
Full article title | What Is health information quality? Ethical dimension and perception by users |
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Journal | Frontiers in Medicine |
Author(s) | Al-Jefri, Majed; Evans, Roger; Uchyigit, Gulden; Ghezzi, Pietro |
Author affiliation(s) | University of Brighton, Brighton and Sussex Medical School |
Primary contact | Email: pietro dot ghezzi at gmail dot com |
Editors | Sampaio, Cristina |
Year published | 2018 |
Volume and issue | 5 |
Page(s) | 260 |
DOI | 10.3389/fmed.2018.00260 |
ISSN | 2296-858X |
Distribution license | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International |
Website | https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2018.00260/full |
Download | https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2018.00260/pdf (PDF) |
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Abstract
Introduction: The popularity of seeking health information online makes information quality (IQ) a public health issue. The present study aims at building a theoretical framework of health information quality (HIQ) that can be applied to websites and defines which IQ criteria are important for a website to be trustworthy and meet users' expectations.
Methods: We have identified a list of HIQ criteria from existing tools and assessment criteria and elaborated them into a questionnaire that was promoted via social media and, mainly, the university. Responses (329) were used to rank the different criteria for their importance in trusting a website and to identify patterns of criteria using hierarchical cluster analysis.
Results: HIQ criteria were organized in five dimensions based on previous theoretical frameworks, as well as on how they cluster together in the questionnaire response. We could identify a top-ranking dimension (scientific completeness) that describes what the user is expecting to know from the websites (in particular: description of symptoms, treatments, side effects). Cluster analysis also identified a number of criteria borrowed from existing tools for assessing HIQ that could be subsumed to a broad “ethical” dimension (such as conflict of interests, privacy, advertising policies) that were, in general, ranked of low importance by the participants. Subgroup analysis revealed significant differences in the importance assigned to the various criteria based on gender, language, and whether or not a biomedical educational background was evident.
Conclusions: We identified criteria of HIQ and organized them in dimensions. We observed that ethical criteria, while regarded highly in the academic and medical environment, are not considered highly by the public.
Keywords: internet, information quality, ethics, online information, public health
Introduction
With the diffusion of the internet, many have been concerned that, due to its unregulated and unfiltered nature, it could misinform or disinform the public. The lack of widely used search engines (Google was founded in 1998) left entirely up to the users which websites to trust among the relatively few ones (compared to 2018) available. These concerns led to the development, in the late 1990s, of instruments and organizations to assess health information quality (HIQ) of websites, including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) criteria[1], DISCERN[2], and the criteria for meeting the health-on-the-net (HON) code of conduct (3).[3] These instruments were developed for different purposes: the JAMA and DISCERN tools were aimed at providing customers with instruments to assess websites[1][2]; the HON criteria are used by the HON foundation to certify health websites with the display of the HONCode quality seal, and this was originally aimed at organizations to help them develop websites.[3] The criteria of HIQ considered by these three approaches are listed in Table 1.
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References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Silberg, W.M.; Lundberg, G.D.; Musacchio, R.A. (1997). "Assessing, controlling, and assuring the quality of medical information on the Internet: Caveant lector et viewor--Let the reader and viewer beware". JAMA 277 (15): 1244–5. doi:10.1001/jama.1997.03540390074039. PMID 9103351.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Charnock, D.; Shepperd, S.; Needham, G.; Gann, R. (1999). "DISCERN: An instrument for judging the quality of written consumer health information on treatment choices". Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 53 (2): 105–11. doi:10.1136/jech.53.2.105. PMC PMC1756830. PMID 10396471. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1756830.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Boyer, C.; Selby, M.; Scherrer, J.R.; Appel, R.D. (1998). "The Health On the Net Code of Conduct for medical and health Websites". Computers in Biology and Medicine 28 (5): 603-10. doi:10.1016/S0010-4825(98)00037-7. PMID 9861515.
Notes
This presentation is faithful to the original, with only a few minor changes to presentation.