Towards quality management of medical information on the internet: evaluation, labelling, and filtering of information

Abstract

# Towards quality management of medical information on the internet: evaluation, labelling, and filtering of information {#article-title-2} The principal dilemma of the internet is that, while its anarchic nature is desirable for fostering open debate without censorship, this raises questions about the quality of information available, which could inhibit its usefulness. While the internet allows “medical minority interest groups to access information of critical interest to them so that morbidity in these rare conditions can be lessened,”1 it also gives quacks such as the “cancer healer” Ryke Geerd Hamer a platform (http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/3374/index.htm).2–4 Quality is defined as “the totality of characteristics of an entity that bear on its ability to satisfy stated and implied needs.”5 For quality to be evaluated, these needs have to be defined and translated into a set of quantitatively or qualitatively stated requirements for the characteristics of an entity that reflect the stated and implied needs. So how can we define consumers' “needs” in the case of medical information on the internet? The quality of medical information is particularly important because misinformation could be a matter of life or death.6 Thus, studies investigating the “quality of medical information” on the various internet venues—websites,7 mailing lists and newsgroups, 8 9 and in email communication between patients and doctors10—are mostly driven by the concern of possible endangerment for patients by low quality medical information. Thus, quality control measures should aim for the Hippocratic injunction “first, do no harm.” Most papers published so far about the problem of quality of medical internet information focus on assessing reliability, but, as box 1 shows, this should be only one aspect of quality measures aiming for “first, do no harm.” Another should be to provide context. Although these two problems are different in nature and different measures may be proposed to solve them, we discuss a common measure that could … Correspondence to: Dr Bonati