Supporting Consumers by Characterizing the Quality of Online Health Information: A Multidimensional Framework

Health care consumers increasingly turn to the World Wide Web for health information to support active participation in their health care. Use of the best health information requires consumers to assess the quality of this information. However, consumers face a number of challenges in their online health searches as well as in their use of quality appraisal tools. Our review and synthesis of health information quality appraisal methods reveals a novel model for characterizing the quality of health information from multiple dimensions. Content, usage, authorship, and publication characteristics provide consumers with an organizing framework for assessment that can be suited to match a variety of needs, purposes, and characteristics. New informatics tools that describe quality in multiple ways could meet the needs of consumers by highlighting these multiple dimensions. We present a usage case example and prototype using our Multidimensional Quality Framework to visualize the quality of MEDLINE search results.