Iris Julia Elene Wilke Van Der Heijden*, Health on the net Foundation, Chene-Bourg, Switzerland Natalia Pletneva, Health on the net Foundation, Chene-Bourg, Switzerland Lonneke Van Der Plas, IMS - University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany Celia Boyer, Health on the net Foundation, Chene-Bourg, Switzerland Track: Research Presentation Topic: Search, Collaborative Filtering and Recommender Technologies Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2012-09-13

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Objective:
In on-line health information search, the need for Intelligent Information Access (IIA) techniques is particularly strong because the available information varies widely on the level of quality, trustworthiness, and readability. On-going research has been showing poor quality and low relevance of the search results using popular search engines for a range of health conditions, often not suitable for a person without health science background. The aim of the study was to identify current difficulties encountered by non-physicians and possible improvements IIA techniques could bring.
Methods:
A web-based questionnaire was developed and made publicly accessible during 2 months in 2011. We mainly promoted the questionnaire via the HONcode certified web sites and social media. We applied descriptive statistics, and ANOVA analysis and post-hoc comparisons with Tukey method to reveal differences between population groups.
Results: We received answers from 385 respondents (at least 90% of answered questions) of mostly highly educated (79% with university degree) Internet savvy European users. 30% of the respondents work in healthcare (other but physicians), 21% have computer and mathematical occupations, or work in education and training (13%). 51% (N=194) stated “sometimes” having difficulties to find an answer. Relevance of matches (83%, N=379), questionable trustworthiness (81%, N=374), quality and completeness of description (75%, N=363), overload with information quantity (72%, N=372) and lack of quality filter (69%, N=365) are the top-5 difficulties respondents face at least sometimes. Desired functionalities imply personalization, categorization of results, cross-language access, recommender system and interactive query reformulation.
Conclusion:
The survey has aggregated the opinions of highly educated frequent searchers of online health information. We have identified several limitations of current search engines for the task of on-line health information search, that can be tackled by IIA techniques mentioned above.
Practice Implications:
There is a need to work towards personalized solutions which provide users with trustworthy information to help them make informed health decisions. This is the goal of the EU project KHRESMOI (2010-2014|FP7:257528).
Keywords:
Online health information search, Intelligent Information Access techniques, survey, non-physicians