FROM THE FOUNDATION

Paper to Electronic Charts Made Easy

Community clinics with experience making the transition from paper to electronic records share the strategies, techniques, and insights they learned along the way.

Telehealth Project to Provide Dental Care

Low-income families will receive free dental care, thanks to the Virtual Dental Home, a telehealth project supported by CHCF and other funders. The four-year pilot project will eventually operate in nine California communities.

Take the DiabetesMine Design Challenge

Have a creative idea for a new tool to improve life with diabetes? The 2010 DiabetesMine Design Challenge is offering $23,000 in cash, plus consultations with design experts and other prizes. CHCF is a sponsor; entries are due by April 30.

Have you signed up for your free subscription and the daily email update? Please login or register to continue your session.

Consumer Information

Monday, June 04, 2007

Consumers Rely on Google for Online Health Searches

Online search tools increasingly are being used to find health information, but it can be difficult to determine what information is trustworthy, Government Health IT reports.

"Search is great at finding us places with relevant information, but it is hard to know which links are reliable and which are less so," Adam Bosworth, Google's vice president of engineering, wrote on the Google blog.

Specialized health information providers, such as WebMD and the National Library of Medicine's MedlinePlus, have included search capabilities on their Web sites, although these sites use a limited amount of clinical and academic sources for the information they provide. However, Google's Co-op platform allows Web developers to create customized search engines that provide all of the health information that its technology can collect.

"Usability studies show us that people want this kind of search to be as easy as possible, and they prefer to use Google," Joyce Backus, deputy chief of the National Library of Medicine's Public Services Division, said.

However, Google's keyword-based approach to searches produces links that do not reflect the relevance and breadth of medical data, George Krucik, senior product manager of Healthline Networks, said. Healthline uses a taxonomic approach to its medical searching, and it ranks the relevance of information based on how it links to other information in answering queries to specific illnesses.

Google has recognized its limitations in finding verifiable sources and has recruited the Mayo Clinic, the National Library of Medicine, CDC and the Medical Library Association to help it evaluate and tag trustworthy Web sites.

Other health search engines, such as Healia, use semantic search technology, which helps computers understand what search terms mean and how they relate to specific medical concepts, Government Health IT reports.

The problem associated with any online health search engine is that it assumes users will be able to understand the information once they find it, according to Government Health IT (Robinson, Government Health IT, 6/4).



Readers are invited to send feedback to: ihb@chcf.org

Click to register for iHealthBeat