Evaluation of Health Information on the Web
Sathi T. Marath, Michael A. Shepherd, Carolyn R. Watters, Jack Duffy, Sander van Zanten · 2007
There is a growing number of websites containing patient or consumer health information. The assumption is that patients should be able to become knowledgeable about their health conditions and become more involved in the management of their own health, but there are concerns about the validity of the information to be found on the Web. The goal of this research is to develop a system that evaluates websites containing educational information about Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) to determine their quality and appropriateness for consumers. A small number of websites on IBD were evaluated manually by experts in the field. A number of different approaches based on machine learning algorithms evaluate websites as Excellent, Informative or Not Useful. Results of this approach are promising, but inconclusive as the dataset of websites for training and testing was not sufficiently large for any real conclusions to be made.