Surfing for health: user evaluation of a health information website. Part one: Background and literature review.

The Government in Britain is set on using the Internet to expand the provision of health information to the general public. Concerns over the quality of the health information have preoccupied commentators and organizations rather than the way users interact with health information systems. This report examines the issues surrounding the provision of electronic health information, and describes an evaluation undertaken of a commercial health website-that of Surgerydoor (http://www.surgerydoor.co.uk/), and comprises two parts. Part one outlines the literature on electronic health information evaluation. It discusses quality issues, but also redresses the imbalance by exploring other evaluative perspectives. Part two describes an evaluation of a health information Internet site in terms of its usability and appeal, undertaken as part of a Department of Health funded study on the impact of such systems.

[1]  Angel A Hernández-Borges,et al.  Can Examination of WWW Usage Statistics and other Indirect Quality Indicators Help to Distinguish the Relative Quality of Medical websites? , 1999, Journal of medical Internet research.

[2]  Vikki Entwistle,et al.  Informing patients: an assessment of the quality of patient information materials Informing patients: an assessment of the quality of patient information materials Coulter Angela Entwisde Vikki Gilbert David King's Fund 219pp £16.95 1-85717-2144-0 18571721440. , 1999, Nursing Standard.

[3]  David E. Rowley,et al.  The cognitive jogthrough: a fast-paced user interface evaluation procedure , 1992, CHI.

[4]  D Charnock,et al.  DISCERN: an instrument for judging the quality of written consumer health information on treatment choices. , 1999, Journal of epidemiology and community health.

[5]  Peter Williams,et al.  Age and gender user differences of a touch-screen kiosk: a study of kiosk transaction log files , 2002 .

[6]  Stephen E. Robertson,et al.  Large Test Collection Experiments on an Operational, Interactive System: Okapi at TREC , 1995, Inf. Process. Manag..

[7]  Carol Collier Kuhlthau,et al.  Seeking Meaning: a process approach to library and information services" Ablex Publishing , 2003 .

[8]  Peter Williams,et al.  Establishing metrics for the evaluation of touch screen kiosks , 2001, J. Inf. Sci..

[9]  A Coulter,et al.  Sharing decisions with patients: is the information good enough? , 1999, BMJ.

[10]  Frederick G. Conrad,et al.  Usability testing of world wide web sites , 1997, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[11]  Amanda Spink,et al.  Real life information retrieval: a study of user queries on the Web , 1998, SIGF.

[12]  Paul Kim,et al.  Published criteria for evaluating health related web sites: review , 1999, BMJ.

[13]  Peter Williams,et al.  Delivering Consumer Health Information Digitally: A Comparison Between the Web and Touchscreen Kiosk , 2003, Journal of Medical Systems.

[14]  Reijo Savolainen.  Everyday life information seeking: Approaching information seeking in the context of “way of life” , 1995 .

[15]  William Sugar.  User-Centered Perspective of Information Retrieval Research and Analysis Methods. , 1995 .

[16]  A R Jadad,et al.  Rating health information on the Internet: navigating to knowledge or to Babel? , 1998, JAMA.

[17]  Paul Huntington,et al.  Health kiosk use: a national comparative study , 2001, Aslib Proc..

[18]  P. Impicciatore,et al.  Reliability of health information for the public on the world wide web: systematic survey of advice on managing fever in children at home , 1997, BMJ.

[19]  Chun Wei Choo,et al.  A behavioral model of information seeking on the web: preliminary results of a study of how managers and IT specialists use the web , 1998 .