Opportunities and challenges of Web 2.0 within the health care systems: an empirical exploration.

The Internet has become one of the main drivers of e-health. Whilst its impact and potential is being analysed, the Web 2.0 phenomenon has reached the health field and has emerged as a buzzword that people use to describe a wide range of online activities and applications. The aims of this article are: to explore the opportunities and challenges of the Web 2.0 within the health care system and to identify the gap between the potential of these online activities and applications and the empirical data. The analysis is based on: online surveys to physicians, nurses, pharmacist and patient support groups; static web shot analysis of 1240 web pages and exploration of the most popular Web 2.0 initiatives. The empirical results contrast with the Web 2.0 trends identified. Whereas the main characteristic of the Web 2.0 is the opportunity for social interaction, the health care system at large could currently be characterised by: a lack of interactive communication technologies available on the Internet; a lack of professional production of health care information on the Internet, and a lack of interaction between these professionals and patients on the Internet. These results reveal a scenario away from 2.0 trends.

MedIEQ-Quality labelling of medical web content using multilingual information extraction.

Quality of Internet health information is essential because it has the potential to benefit or harm a large number of people and it is therefore essential to provide consumers with some tools to aid them in assessing the nature of the information they are accessing and how they should use it without jeopardizing their relationship with their doctor. Organizations around the world are working on establishing standards of quality in the accreditation of health-related web content. For the full success of these initiatives, they must be equipped with technologies that enable the automation of the rating process and allow the continuous monitoring of labelled web sites alerting the labelling agency. In this paper we describe the European project MedIEQ (Quality Labelling of Medical Web Content Using Multilingual Information Extraction) that integrates the efforts of relevant organizations on medical quality labelling, multilingual information retrieval and extraction and semantic resources, from six different European countries (Spain, Germany, Greece, Finland, Czech Republic and Switzerland). The main objectives of MedIEQ are: first, to develop a scheme for the quality labelling of medical web content and provide the tools supporting the creation, maintenance and access of labelling data according to this scheme and second, to specify a methodology for the content analysis of medical web sites according to the MedIEQ scheme and develop the tools that will implement it.

Quality labelling of medical web content.

As the number of medical websites in various languages increases, it is increasingly necessary to establish specific criteria and control measures that give consumers some guarantee that the health websites they are visiting meet a minimum level of quality standards. Further, reassurance is needed that the professionals offering the information are suitably qualified. The paper briefly presents the current mechanisms for labelling medical web content and introduces the work done in the EC-funded project Quatro. This has defined a vocabulary for quality labels and a schema to deliver them in a machine-processable format. In addition, the paper proposes the development of a labelling platform that will assist the work of medical labelling agencies in automating, up to a certain level, the retrieval of unlabelled medical websites and their labelling, and the monitoring of labelled websites as to whether they are still satisfying the criteria.