scholarly journals Websites as a tool for public health education: determining the trustworthiness of health websites on Ebola disease

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronak Hamzehei ◽  
Masoumeh Ansari ◽  
Shahabedin Rahmatizadeh ◽  
Saeideh Valizadeh-Haghi
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Information ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
English Language ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Emergency Situation ◽  
Financial Disclosure ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Web

Objectives: Health service providers use internet as a tool for the spreading of health information and people often go on the web to acquire information about a disease. A wide range of information with varying qualities and by authors with varying degrees of credibility has thus become accessible by the public. Most people believe that the health information available on the internet is reliable. This issue reveals the need for having a critical view of the health information available online that is directly related to people's life. The Ebola epidemic is an emergency situation in the international public health domain and the internet is regarded as an important source for obtaining information on this disease. Given the absence of studies on the trustworthiness of health websites on Ebola, the present study was conducted to assess the trustworthiness of websites which are focused on this disease.Methods: The term "Ebola" was searched in Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines. Google Chrome browser was used for this purpose with the settings fixed on yielding 10 results per page. The first 30 English language websites in each of the three search engines were evaluated manually by using the HONcode of conduct tool. Moreover, the official HONcode toolbar was used to identify websites that had been officially certified by HON foundation. Results: Almost the half of the retrieved websites were commercial (49%). Complementarity was the least-observed criterion (37%) in all the websites retrieved from all three-search engines. Justifiability, Transparency and Financial Disclosure had been completely observed (100%).Discussion: The present study showed that only three criteria (Justifiability, Transparency and Financial Disclosure) out of the eight HON criteria were observed in the examined websites. Like other health websites, the websites concerned with Ebola are not reliable and should be used with caution.Conclusion: Considering the lack of a specific policy about the publication of health information on the web, it is necessary for healthcare providers to advise their patients to use only credible websites. Furthermore, teaching them the criteria for assessing the trustworthiness of health websites would be helpful.

scholarly journals Accuracy of internet images of glenoid labral injuries

2013 ◽  
Vol 95 (6) ◽  
pp. 418-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
R Freeman ◽  
F Ashouri ◽  
J Papanikitas ◽  
D Ricketts
Keyword(s):  
Health Information ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
Shoulder Dislocation ◽  
Medical Images ◽  
Interobserver Reliability ◽  
Bankart Lesion ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Glenoid Labrum ◽  
Written Information ◽  
Internet Images

Introduction The internet is a convenient source of health information used widely by patients and doctors. Previous studies have found that the written information provided was often inaccurate. There is no literature regarding the accuracy of medical images on the internet. The aim of this study was to assess the accuracy of internet images of injuries to the glenoid labrum following shoulder dislocation. Methods The Google and Bing search engines were used to find images of Bankart, Perthes and anterior labroligamentous periosteal sleeve avulsion (ALPSA) lesions. Three independent reviewers assessed the accuracy of image labelling. Results Of images labelled ‘Bankart lesion’, 30% (9/30) were incorrect while ‘Perthes lesion’ images were incorrect in 15% of cases (9/60) and 4% of ‘ALPSA lesion’ images were incorrect (2/46). There was good interobserver reliability (kappa = 0.81). Labelling accuracy was better on educational sites than on commercial sites (6% vs 25% inaccurate, p=0.0013). Conclusions Caution is recommended when interpreting non-peer reviewed images on the internet.

scholarly journals Protocol paper for the ‘Harnessing resources from the internet to maximise outcomes from GP consultations (HaRI)’ study: a mixed qualitative methods study

BMJ Open ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (8) ◽  
pp. e024188
Author(s):  
Maureen Seguin ◽  
Laura Hall ◽  
Helen Atherton ◽  
Rebecca Barnes ◽  
Geraldine Leydon ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Information ◽  
Current Evidence ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Online Health Information ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Patient Questionnaires ◽  
Ethical Approval ◽  
Use Of The Internet ◽  
Questionnaire Studies

IntroductionMany patients now turn to the internet as a resource for healthcare information and advice. However, patients’ use of the internet to manage their health has been positioned as a potential source of strain on the doctor–patient relationship in primary care. The current evidence about what happens when internet-derived health information is introduced during consultations has relied on qualitative data derived from interview or questionnaire studies. The ‘Harnessing resources from the internet to maximise outcomes from GP consultations (HaRI)’ study combines questionnaire, interview and video-recorded consultation data to address this issue more fully.Methods and analysisThree data collection methods are employed: preconsultation patient questionnaires, video-recorded consultations between general practitioners (GP) and patients, and semistructured interviews with GPs and patients. We seek to recruit 10 GPs practising in Southeast England. We aim to collect up to 30 patient questionnaires and video-recorded consultations per GP, yielding up to 300. Up to 30 patients (approximately three per participating GP) will be selected for interviews sampled for a wide range of sociodemographic characteristics, and a variety of ways the use of, or information from, the internet was present or absent during their consultation. We will interview all 10 participating GPs about their views of online health information, reflecting on their own usage of online information during consultations and their patients’ references to online health information. Descriptive, conversation and thematic analysis will be used respectively for the patient questionnaires, video-recorded consultations and interviews.Ethics and disseminationEthical approval has been granted by the London–Camden & Kings Cross Research Ethics Committee. Alongside journal publications, dissemination activities include the creation of a toolkit to be shared with patients and doctors, to guide discussions of material from the internet in consultations.

scholarly journals Multidimensional Feature Classification of the Health Information Needs of Patients With Hypertension in an Online Health Community Through Analysis of 1000 Patient Question Records: Observational Study

10.2196/17349 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. e17349
Author(s):  
Aijing Luo ◽  
Zirui Xin ◽  
Yifeng Yuan ◽  
Tingxiao Wen ◽  
Wenzhao Xie ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Information ◽  
Classification System ◽  
Information Needs ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Demographic Data ◽  
Clinical Findings ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Good Doctor ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Symptoms And Signs

Background With the rapid development of online health communities, increasing numbers of patients and families are seeking health information on the internet. Objective This study aimed to discuss how to fully reveal the health information needs expressed by patients with hypertension in their questions in a web-based environment and how to use the internet to help patients with hypertension receive personalized health education. Methods This study randomly selected 1000 text records from the question data of patients with hypertension from 2008 to 2018 collected from Good Doctor Online and constructed a classification system through literature research and content analysis. This paper identified the background characteristics and questioning intention of each patient with hypertension based on the patient’s question and used co-occurrence network analysis and the k-means clustering method to explore the features of the health information needs of patients with hypertension. Results The classification system for the health information needs of patients with hypertension included the following nine dimensions: drugs (355 names), symptoms and signs (395 names), tests and examinations (545 names), demographic data (526 kinds), diseases (80 names), risk factors (37 names), emotions (43 kinds), lifestyles (6 kinds), and questions (49 kinds). There were several characteristics of the explored web-based health information needs of patients with hypertension. First, more than 49% of patients described features, such as drugs, symptoms and signs, tests and examinations, demographic data, and diseases. Second, patients with hypertension were most concerned about treatment (778/1000, 77.80%), followed by diagnosis (323/1000, 32.30%). Third, 65.80% (658/1000) of patients asked physicians several questions at the same time. Moreover, 28.30% (283/1000) of patients were very concerned about how to adjust the medication, and they asked other treatment-related questions at the same time, including drug side effects, whether to take the drugs, how to treat the disease, etc. Furthermore, 17.60% (176/1000) of patients consulted physicians about the causes of clinical findings, including the relationship between the clinical findings and a disease, the treatment of a disease, and medications and examinations. Fourth, by k-means clustering, the questioning intentions of patients with hypertension were classified into the following seven categories: “how to adjust medication,” “what to do,” “how to treat,” “phenomenon explanation,” “test and examination,” “disease diagnosis,” and “disease prognosis.” Conclusions In a web-based environment, the health information needs expressed by Chinese patients with hypertension to physicians are common and distinct, that is, patients with different background features ask relatively common questions to physicians. The classification system constructed in this study can provide guidance to health information service providers for the construction of web-based health resources, as well as guidance for patient education, which could help solve the problem of information asymmetry in communication between physicians and patients.

scholarly journals Economic Dictionaries on the Web

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (50) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Daniele Besomi
Keyword(s):  
Search Engines ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Electronic Editing ◽  
Paper Structure ◽  
Research Students ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Web

This paper surveys the economic dictionaries available on the internet, both for free and on subscription, addressed to various kinds of audiences from schoolchildren to research students and academics. The focus is not much on content, but on whether and how the possibilities opened by electronic editing and by the modes of distribution and interaction opened by the internet are exploited in the organization and presentation of the materials. The upshot is that although a number of web dictionaries have taken advantage of some of the innovations offered by the internet (in particular the possibility of regularly updating, of turning cross-references into hyperlinks, of adding links to external materials, of adding more or less complex search engines), the observation that internet lexicography has mostly produced more ef! cient dictionary without, however, fundamentally altering the traditional paper structure can be con! rmed for this particular subset of reference works. In particular, what is scarcely explored is the possibility of visualizing the relationship between entries, thus abandoning the project of the early encyclopedists right when the technology provides the means of accomplishing it.

Caught in the Web

2013 ◽  
pp. 1294-1314
Author(s):  
Keith A. Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking ◽  
Health Information ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Personal Health Information ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Privacy And Confidentiality ◽  
Medical Privacy ◽  
The Web

The social consequences of the internet are profound. Evidence of this can easily be found in the enormous body of literature discussing its impact on democracy, globalization, social networking, and education. The implications of the internet for medicine have likewise received a great deal of attention from policy makers, clinicians and technology theorists. Medical privacy, in particular, has garnered the lion’s share of attention. Nevertheless, research in this area has been lacking because it either fails to unpack the conceptual and ethical complexities of privacy or overestimates the power of technology and policy to protect our medical privacy. The aims of this chapter are twofold. The first is to provide a nuanced explication of the concept of privacy, and, second, to argue that e-medicine and the policies supposedly designed to protect the privacy and confidentiality of personal health information fail to do so and in some instances make their violations easier to commit.

Development of Web GIS Based Framework for Public Health Management System Using ERDAS Apollo 2010

2019 ◽  
pp. 239-253
Author(s):  
Shipra Verma
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Information ◽  
Health Management ◽  
Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Health Information Systems ◽  
Web Gis ◽  
Gis Technology ◽  
Java Server Pages ◽  
Public Health Information ◽  
The Web

This paper proposes a framework for an essential creation of a public health information visualization platform, for Japanese Encephalitis (JE) disease outbreaks in the Gorakhpur district, India. The Web GIS technology is used with ERDAS Apollo 2010 software at customized level, to develop architecture for Web GIS-based public health information systems. A GUI has been created using Java Server Pages (JSP) for its customization. This will help in extending the benefit of GIS and Web technology for public availability in the area for preparation of the health plan in multitier system.

Caught in the Web

2011 ◽  
pp. 179-199
Author(s):  
Keith A. Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking ◽  
Health Information ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Personal Health Information ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Privacy And Confidentiality ◽  
Medical Privacy ◽  
The Web

The social consequences of the internet are profound. Evidence of this can easily be found in the enormous body of literature discussing its impact on democracy, globalization, social networking, and education. The implications of the internet for medicine have likewise received a great deal of attention from policy makers, clinicians and technology theorists. Medical privacy, in particular, has garnered the lion’s share of attention. Nevertheless, research in this area has been lacking because it either fails to unpack the conceptual and ethical complexities of privacy or overestimates the power of technology and policy to protect our medical privacy. The aims of this chapter are twofold. The first is to provide a nuanced explication of the concept of privacy, and, second, to argue that e-medicine and the policies supposedly designed to protect the privacy and confidentiality of personal health information fail to do so and in some instances make their violations easier to commit.

Seek and Ye Shall Find

2011 ◽  
pp. 740-754 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suely Fragoso
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Search Engine ◽  
Mass Distribution ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
Distribution Model ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Information Distribution ◽  
Distribution Mode ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Web

This chapter proposes that search engines apply a verticalizing pressure on the WWW many-to-many information distribution model, forcing this to revert to a distributive model similar to that of the mass media. The argument for this starts with a critical descriptive examination of the history of search mechanisms for the Internet. Parallel to this there is a discussion of the increasing ties between the search engines and the advertising market. The chapter then presents questions concerning the concentration of traffic on the Web around a small number of search engines which are in the hands of an equally limited number of enterprises. This reality is accentuated by the confidence that users place in the search engine and by the ongoing acquisition of collaborative systems and smaller players by the large search engines. This scenario demonstrates the verticalizing pressure that the search engines apply to the majority of WWW users, that bring it back toward the mass distribution mode.

Asset Based Approaches for Community Engagement

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina Wyatt ◽  
Robin Durie ◽  
Felicity Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Environmental Science ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Communicable Disease ◽  
Poor Health ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Policies And Programs

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science. Please check back later for the full article. The burden of ill health has shifted, globally, from communicable to non-communicable disease, with poor health clustering in areas of economic deprivation. However, for the most part, public health programs remain focused on changing behaviors associated with poor health (such as smoking or physical inactivity) rather than the contexts that give rise to, and influence, the wide range of behaviors associated with poor health. This way of understanding and responding to population ill health views poor health behavior as a defining “problem” exhibited by a particular group of individuals or a community, which needs to be solved by the intervention of expert practitioners. This sort of approach determines individuals and their communities in terms of deficits, and works on the basis of perceived needs within such communities when seeking to address public health issues. Growing recognition that many of the fundamental determinants of health cannot be attributed solely to individuals, but result instead from the complex interplay between individuals and their social, economic, and cultural environments, has led to calls for new ways of delivering policies and programs aimed at improving health and reducing health inequalities. Such approaches include the incorporation of subjective perspectives and priorities to inform the creation of “health promoting societal contexts.” Alongside this, asset-based approaches to health creation place great emphasis on valuing the skills, knowledge, connections, and potential within a community and seek to identify the protective factors within a neighborhood or organization that support health and wellbeing. Connecting Communities (C2) is a unique asset-based program aimed at creating the conditions for health and wellness within very low-income communities. At the heart of the program is the belief that health emerges from the patterns of relations within neighborhoods, rather than being a static attribute of individuals. C2 seeks to change the nature of the relations both within communities and with service providers (such as the police, housing, education, and health professionals) to co-create responses to issues that are identified by community members themselves. While many of the issues identified concern local environmental conditions, such as vandalism or safe out-door spaces, many are also contributory determinants of ill health. Listening to people, understanding the social, cultural, and environmental context within which they are located, and supporting new partnerships based on reciprocity and mutual benefit ensures that solutions are grounded in the local context and not externally determined, in turn resulting in sustainable health creating communities.

Promoting online drug safety: Using public–private partnerships to deter illicit online drug sales

1969 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy K Mackey ◽  
Bryan A Liang
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Patient Safety ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Health Information ◽  
Drug Safety ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Critical Problem ◽  
Multiple Stakeholders ◽  
Counterfeit Drugs

Illicit online pharmacies selling counterfeit drugs in a global virtual marketplace remain a critical problem in global health. Yet they continue to operate with little regulation while growing numbers of consumers access the Internet for health information that may lead them to purchase dangerous drugs online. This global social problem requires immediate action to protect patient safety and public health. Public–private partnerships models represent a potentially effective way to address this issue through promoting mechanisms of collaboration and coordination of multiple stakeholders.

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