Health Information Websites: Is the Health Consumer Being Well-Served?

Increasingly health consumers are looking to the Internet for health and medical information. In response to this government and government agencies are establishing websites to provide consumers with better access to health information. Health consumers however, face numerous problems searching health information websites including poor quality information, difficulty in finding relevant information and poor website usability. Further, while there is much research on trust and quality of health information, there is little on the effectiveness of health information websites from the consumer's perspective. This paper argues that for a health information website to be effective it must engender trust in the health consumer, have features and functionality that help users retrieve relevant information and be easy to use. This paper presents the results of a research project that examined Australian health websites from the perspective of quality, functionality and ease of use. We found that few health websites provide information on quality, limited use of technology is made to improve information retrieval and the usability of health websites is less than ideal. The research also identified factors that impact on the users’ perception of quality and overall effectiveness of websites and provides recommendations for designing more effective health information websites.