Quality criteria and access characteristics of Web sites: proposal for the design of a health Internet directory.
(41/1190)
The increasing volume of information available on the Internet today is a problem for health care professionals who want to access rapidly data of high quality. Usual search engines and directories are not sufficient to satisfy their needs. Moreover, the information published by Web sites is not always guaranteed. Some institutions around the word deal with the definition of a set of criteria for the evaluation of medical Web sites. We base our current work on the technologies we developed previously in order to integrate sources of information of various kinds using the "Unified Medical Language System" knowledge bases. This paper focuses on quality criteria and access characteristics Web sites should satisfy to be registered in a "Health Internet Directory". The design of such a system is proposed and discussed. (+info)
Construction of a virtual EPR and automated contextual linkage to multiple sources of support information on the Oxford Clinical Intranet.
(42/1190)
We have used internet-standard tools to provide access for clinicians to the components of the electronic patient record held on multiple remote disparate systems. Through the same interface we have provided access to multiple knowledgebases, some written locally and others published elsewhere. We have developed linkage between these two types of information which removes the need for the user to drill down into each knowledgebase to search for relevant information. This approach may help in the implementation of evidence-based practice. The major problems appear to be semantic rather than technological. The intranet was developed at low cost and is now in routine use. This approach appears to be transferable across systems and organisations. (+info)
A Web link management tool for optimizing utilization of distributed knowledge in health care applications.
(43/1190)
The number of health-related Web sites on the Internet is increasing. Incorporating these sites into clinical decision support systems and other health care applications can significantly enhance the educational and instructional value of such systems. While search engines exist for finding sites and criteria are available for assessing site quality, few tools are available for managing Web-based health care information. Management of Web-based information is particularly challenging because the information is continually changing and new resources are continually being added. In this paper, we describe the development and use of a Web-link manager for health care applications. This system retains search strategies for repeated use, catalogues search results in a search results database, accommodates tracking of site review and use status, and provides periodic checking of link integrity for sites that are used in local applications. The Web-link manager is currently in use to manage the links used in a clinical decision support system that presents clinical practice guidelines interactively to clinicians at the point of care. (+info)
Effectiveness of an information broker service.
(44/1190)
The many disparate databases existing within the same health care organization create confusion and frustration for the consumer trying to get integrated information. The purpose of this research was to create a regional service that would provide a customer oriented information broker service with a single point of contact and guaranteed performance. From 1/98-6/99 there were 34 requests made. 23 were completed on time, eight still in progress and three were late (86.46% on time, average late time 0.76 days). 13 clinical departments used the service. Data was integrated from twelve different data sources. The requests produced about 2 Gigabytes of integrated data (416,666 single spaced pages). The resources required were approximately 1.3 FTE ($65K in direct costs). The cost/page of integrated information was 19 cents. The benefit to cost ratio was at least 3 and most likely higher. Surveys of customers indicated high satisfaction with services and would both utilize the service again and recommend it to others. (+info)
Filtering Web pages for quality indicators: an empirical approach to finding high quality consumer health information on the World Wide Web.
(45/1190)
The World Wide Web is an increasingly popular source for consumer health information, but many authors have expressed concerns about the quality of health information present on the Internet. We have developed a prototype system that responds to a consumer health query by returning a list of Web pages that are ranked according to the likely quality of the page contents. A computer program identifies some of the criteria that have been suggested for assessing the quality of health information on the Internet. It also identifies characteristics that may serve as proxies for desirable (or undesirable) qualities that are difficult to assess directly using an algorithm. Intervening in the search process and automatically analyzing the contents of each page returned by a general search engine may facilitate the search for high quality consumer health information on the Web. (+info)
The low availability of metadata elements for evaluating the quality of medical information on the World Wide Web.
(46/1190)
A great barrier to the use of Internet resources for patient education is the concern over the quality of information available. We conducted a study to determine what information was available in Web pages, both within text and metadata source code, that could be used in the assessment of information quality. Analysis of pages retrieved from 97 unique sites using a simple keyword search for "breast cancer treatment" on a generic and a health-specific search engine revealed that basic publishing elements were present in low frequency: authorship (20%), attribution/references (32%), disclosure (41%), and currency (35%). Only one page retrieved contained all four elements. Automated extraction of metadata elements from the source code of 822 pages retrieved from five popular generic search engines revealed even less information. We discuss the design of a metadata-based system for the evaluation of quality of medical content on the World Wide Web that addresses current limitations in ensuring quality. (+info)
Analysis of information needs of users of the Stanford Health Information Network for Education.
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OBJECTIVE: To examine the information needs of users of the Stanford Health Information Network for Education (SHINE), an integrated information retrieval (IR) system. METHODS: A subset of queries from the SHINE log were categorized into one or more of 33 categories. RESULTS: Drugs and infectious disease accounted for 25% of categorizations, and otherwise the distribution of categorizations was quite broad. CONCLUSIONS: Attention should be paid to the selection of drug information resources in medical knowledge information retrieval systems. The distribution of query categorizations also suggests that IR systems include a wide range of knowledge resources. (+info)
Session management for web-based healthcare applications.
(48/1190)
In health care systems, users may access multiple applications during one session of interaction with the system. However, users must sign on to each application individually, and it is difficult to maintain a common context among these applications. We are developing a session management system for web-based applications using LDAP directory service, which will allow single sign-on to multiple web-based applications, and maintain a common context among those applications for the user. This paper discusses the motivations for building this system, the system architecture, and the challenges of our approach, such as the session objects management for the user, and session security. (+info)