Quality of health information for consumers on the web: A systematic review of indicators, criteria, tools, and evaluation results

Abstract

The quality of online health information for consumers has been a critical issue that concerns all stakeholders in healthcare. To gain an understanding of how quality is evaluated, this systematic review examined 165 articles in which researchers evaluated the quality of consumer‐oriented health information on the web against predefined criteria. It was found that studies typically evaluated quality in relation to the substance and formality of content, as well as to the design of technological platforms. Attention to design, particularly interactivity, privacy, and social and cultural appropriateness is on the rise, which suggests the permeation of a user‐centered perspective into the evaluation of health information systems, and a growing recognition of the need to study these systems from a social‐technical perspective. Researchers used many preexisting instruments to facilitate evaluation of the formality of content; however, only a few were used in multiple studies, and their validity was questioned. The quality of content (i.e., accuracy and completeness) was always evaluated using proprietary instruments constructed based on medical guidelines or textbooks. The evaluation results revealed that the quality of health information varied across medical domains and across websites, and that the overall quality remained problematic. Future research is needed to examine the quality of user‐generated content and to explore opportunities offered by emerging new media that can facilitate the consumer evaluation of health information.