Towards A Unique Online Healthcare Information (OHI) Recommender: A Preliminary Case Study

As online healthcare consumerism grows, more and more internet users tend to rely upon web contents hosted by different online healthcare service providers and third-party websites, for making healthcare service related decisions, like choosing providers. With an increasing number of healthcare consumers browsing provider information online and using that data to drive decisions, trust implications entailing such actions become a relevant and significant point of discussion. Currently there are no standards or benchmarks in relation to assessing the reliability of online healthcare information (OHI), including provider profiles and web-based explicit contents, plus online website services for finding providers. In this paper, we present a unique approach towards designing an online recommender tool for verifying OHI that applies information assurance to web contents and acts as an advisor for both users and providers. We introduce our multi-dimensional trust model that drives our OHI recommender, which accounts for multi-layered trust antecedents, like security, assurance, social presence, verification, reputation, and familiarity. We describe our preliminary proof of concept (POC) prototype implementation of the OHI recommender, and discuss how it works, including how it generates an overall trust score for a particular OHI web page. We demonstrate how our OHI recommender can be used for advising on how to improve the online contents for achieving a higher trust assessment, and for better meeting user trust expectations. We report the results obtained by testing our POC prototype of the OHI recommender on selected OHI provider websites. Through this work, we look to aid more reliable design of online healthcare profiles, that can win consumer trust by providing information assurance and insights.