Instruments to Assess the Quality of Health Information on the World Wide Web: What Can Our Patients Actually Use?

Objective: To find and assess quality-rating instruments that can be used by health care consumers to assess websites displaying health information.

Data Sources: Searches of PubMed, the World Wide Web (using five different search engines), reference tracing from identified articles, and a review of the of the American Medical Informatics Association's annual symposium proceedings.

Review Methods: Sources were examined for availability, number of elements, objectivity, and readability.

Results: A total of 273 distinct instruments were found and analyzed. Of these, 80 (29%) made evaluation criteria publicly available and 24 (8.7%) had 10 or fewer elements (items that a user has to assess to evaluate a website). Seven instruments consisted of elements that could all be evaluated objectively. Of these seven, one instrument consisted entirely of criteria with acceptable interobserver reliability (kappa> or =0.6); another instrument met readability standards.

Conclusions: There are many quality-rating instruments, but few are likely to be practically usable by the intended audience.