An Information Reliability index as a Simple Consumer-oriented Indication of Quality of Medical Web Sites

Since typical healthcare consumers may lack sufficient knowledge to evaluate the reliability of health-related contents published online, recent researches are addressing the usefulness of Web page evaluation tools to help these consumers assess the quality of the indications they retrieve online. This paper contributes in this line by proposing an intentionally simple composite index of information quality, the so called Medical Information Reliability (MIR) index. This index takes the attitudes of potential and actual consumers toward information quality into account, and it is intended to be applied to online sources of medical information as "trust indicator" to provide their potential consumers with a simple percentage score by which to evaluate the reliability of what they are consulting. The main idea underlying this index is to consider information quality a multidimensional aspect of an online resource and relate it to the extent such a resource is compliant with explicit requirements formulated by third-party endorsement bodies. The method to calculate the MIR index on a sample of medical sites is presented in a step-by-step manner, and a user study is discussed that validated its application to the domain of the Alternative and Complementary Medicine.