Ari-matti Auvinen*, Aalto University / HEMA Institute, Espoo, Finland Track: Research Presentation Topic: Building virtual communities and social networking applications for patients and consumers Presentation Type: Rapid-Fire Presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School Room: A-Pechet Room Date: 2012-09-15 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM Last modified: 2012-09-11

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Introduction
Internet is an important provider of healthcare information and health-related content is one of the most searched content areas. An important amount of content in the healthcare area is created by users (peers) in blogs, user communities and social networking sites. Recent studies show that user-generated content is also popular among users. The peer users provide and share their experiences, hints, and examples. The various user communities provide also a space for empathy and camaraderie.

Objective
Although the user communities are important health resources for many users, their quality has not been widely researched and discussed. The focus of this study was not in the quality of the content provided within the user communities, but in the quality mechanisms and practices they follow. The key research question was “What are the quality mechanisms and practices implemented in the health-related online user communities?”

Methods
The research sample included different Finnish health-related user communities of five different clusters (patient organizations, lifestyle magazines, fitness equipment providers, user-driven communities, social networking communities). The elementary features of the quality mechanisms and practices researched were the identification of the existing content, creation of the content, validation of the content, editing of the content, enriching of the content and updating of the content. In addition, also general enabling features of quality (enabling policies, enabling procedures and enabling tools) of health-related online communities were investigated.

Results
The various user communities had very different mechanisms and practices in ensuring the quality of their content. In general, content was easy to create by the users, but the content was not validated by experts prior to publishing, and professional moderation was scarcely used. The enrichment of content was rare, as the content was mainly displayed as discussion trees. User rating of the content was one often used quality feature, encouragement for comments and user discussion was another one. However, it showed also that very few of the health-related user communities were yet utilizing the new tools of the “Web 2.0” generation, such as social bookmarking, utilization of various media types or wikis. According to their presentation, most user communities rely heavily on text and thus the potential provided by new media was not widely used.

Conclusions
The variation of the quality mechanisms and practices was wide. In the user communities no explicit quality policies, procedures or practices were published and the users had to learn the implicit quality mechanisms and practices by themselves. The full potential of various available user-driven quality assurance features were not utilized in user communities.