Quantitative Measures of Online Health Information (QMOHI): Broadening the Impact Through Improved Usability, Applicability, and Effectiveness

Universities and colleges offer medical and health services through Student Health Centers (SHCs), and SHC websites are a primary healthcare information source for university and college students. While the educational institutions are trusted as reputed information sources by students, there is no guideline or standard for quality control of online healthcare information on SHC websites. Our tool, Quantitative Measures of Online Health Information (QMOHI), was designed to address this issue and provide quality assessments of health information on SHC websites. In this work, we added new features and also improved the accuracy of one of the information quality evaluation metrics, Similarity. The sentence highlighting feature removed a step of a typical workflow of result analysis in public health studies. Text extraction from PDFs and images enabled QMOHI to assess more comprehensive contents on SHC websites. The algorithm of Similarity estimation was redesigned, and the experiment demonstrated improved accuracy. With these additions, QMOHI has enhanced its performance and usability.