Evaluation
of criteria for assessing health websites
Introduction
In 2003 Health Improvement
Institute (Institute) began a research project conducted collaboratively with Consumer WebWatch. Its purpose is to enable consumers to become
informed users of Internet health information sites (referred to as health
websites). The project consists of a number of phases, to culminate in
independent ratings of health websites. The objective of Phase-I is to develop
a consumer-friendly rating system, based on basic principles and past efforts
to develop evaluation criteria. Phase-I includes:
- Search for previous evaluations of health websites
- Identify existing criteria sets to
- Describe criteria used or
suggested for use in evaluating health websites
- Evaluate the
consumer-friendliness of identified criteria sets.
This report describes the
results of our search for and analysis and evaluation of criteria sets intended
to assess the "reliability" or "credibility" of health
websites.
- Methods
- Results
- Discussion
- References/footnotes
- Table 1: Websites
and articles evaluated
- Table 2: Density
of website assessment criteria
- Table 3: Top ten
specific health website assessment criteria
- Table 4: Number of
criteria sets containing a meta-criterion
- Table 5: Website
criteria sets meeting main evaluation criteria Health website criteria
sets meeting evaluation criteria
- Table 6:
- Appendix 1: Meta
criteria
- Appendix 2: Health
website quality assessment criteria set evaluation form
To volunteer to develop/test health website evaluation tools