Development And Implementation Of An Evaluation Index System For Websites On Diseases

The Internet has become one of the most popular and frequently used sources of information with more and more opportunities for direct patient access to health care resources since1990s. The quality assessment of health-related websites is of significant importance in relation to the health of lay people searching for medical information in the mass of these sites. The objects of this paper are websites on diseases that take providing consumers including patients as well as their relatives, friends, and carers who care about them with the information related to the disease as the main focus.This research aims at improving the shortcomings of current research situation that guidelines for medical websites in general are too obscure while evaluation of websites on a specific disease can only be applied to a limited number of websites. So, this research proposes the concept of "websites on diseases", which is the abstraction layer between medical websites in general and websites on a specific disease. An evaluation index system for websites on disease is developed and is expected to be used in the evaluation of websites on a variety of diseases.In this research, the evaluation index system model for websites on diseases is proposed based on literature review and guidelines of related organizations following basic principles of website evaluation. Different weights are assigned to corresponding dimensions and factors from the perspective of lay people who searching for related information. It is weighted through the combination of questionnaire survey and Analytic Hierarchy Process with the help of MATLAB. In the implementation of the weighted evaluation index system, the feasibility and inter-rater reliability of the evaluation index system is tested and verified using IBM SPSS20.0. Comparative analysis of dental websites in China and abroad is carried out afterwards.Consumers should critically examine information on diseases that they find in their Internet searches whereas website developers and maintainers have to develop websites on diseases that serve users’needs to attract and retain customers. This research can provide references for not only information consumers but also developers and maintainers of websites on diseases. Findings of this research confirmed that dental websites are not equal in quality, which highlight the need for discriminating assessment as well as the direction for discriminating and improving.There are seven chapters in this research. The content of each chapter are introduced as follows:Chapter1:Introduction. This chapter introduces the research background under which the topic is proposed, research object, research objectives, research methods as well as both theoretical and practical significances.Chapter2:Literature Review and Related Organizations. Literature review is mainly about related works including health-related website evaluation in general, website evaluation from specific perspectives as well as evaluation of websites on diseases. Besides that, guidelines of related organizations such as Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Health On the Net (HON) Foundation, and Institute of Health Sciences in the University of Oxford with DISCERN are also investigated.Chapter3:Evaluation Index System Model. The evaluation index system model for websites on diseases is constructed following basic principles for website evaluation and has three levels:the overall quality, three influential dimensions, and corresponding factors for each dimension.Chapter4:Questionnaire Survey. There are three sections in this chapter. The first section is about questionnaire design. The second section describes sample population and illustrates data collection. The third section is data pre-processing, which is the preparation procedure before applying Analytic Hierarchy Process. Chapter5:Analytic Hierarchy Process. This process obtains weighted evaluation index system through a series of procedures including establishment of judgment matrix for factors/dimensions, weight calculation, consistency test, and overall consistency test.Chapter6:Comparative Analysis of Dental Websites. This is the empirical study of the thesis that put the developed weighted evaluation index systems into practice for websites on diseases by evaluating dental websites. Two evaluators took part in the evaluation to test the feasibility and inter-rater reliability. The comparative analysis of dental websites in China and abroad is carried out from three levels including individual factor performance, influential dimensions and overall quality.Chapter7:Discussion and Conclusion. Based on the results of empirical study, research achievement, inadequate points and future work are discussed.