Making Quality Health Websites a National Public Health Priority: Toward Quality Standards

Background: Most US adults have limited health literacy skills. They struggle to understand complex health information and services and to make informed health decisions. The Internet has quickly become one of the most popular places for people to search for information about their health, thereby making access to quality information on the Web a priority. However, there are no standardized criteria for evaluating Web-based health information. Every 10 years, the US Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP) develops a set of measurable objectives for improving the health of the nation over the coming decade, known as Healthy People. There are two objectives in Healthy People 2020 related to website quality. The first is objective Health Communication and Health Information Technology (HC/HIT) 8.1: increase the proportion of health-related websites that meet 3 or more evaluation criteria for disclosing information that can be used to assess information reliability. The second is objective HC/HIT-8.2: increase the proportion of health-related websites that follow established usability principles.

Objective: The ODPHP conducted a nationwide assessment of the quality of Web-based health information using the Healthy People 2020 objectives. The ODPHP aimed to establish (1) a standardized approach to defining and measuring the quality of health websites; (2) benchmarks for measurement; (3) baseline data points to capture the current status of website quality; and (4) targets to drive improvement.

Methods: The ODPHP developed the National Quality Health Website Survey instrument to assess the quality of health-related websites. The ODPHP used this survey to review 100 top-ranked health-related websites in order to set baseline data points for these two objectives. The ODPHP then set targets to drive improvement by 2020.

Results: This study reviewed 100 health-related websites. For objective HC/HIT-8.1, a total of 58 out of 100 (58.0%) websites met 3 or more out of 6 reliability criteria. For objective HC/HIT-8.2, a total of 42 out of 100 (42.0%) websites followed 10 or more out of 19 established usability principles. On the basis of these baseline data points, ODPHP set targets for the year 2020 that meet the minimal statistical significance-increasing objective HC/HIT-8.1 data point to 70.5% and objective HC/HIT-8.2 data point to 55.7%.

Conclusions: This research is a critical first step in evaluating the quality of Web-based health information. The criteria proposed by ODPHP provide methods to assess website quality for professionals designing, developing, and managing health-related websites. The criteria, baseline data, and targets are valuable tools for driving quality improvement.