Assessing the quality of online health information portals (languages other than arabic or english) in asian countries in meeting health on the net (hon) standards

Abstract

The Internet has been considerably used as an essential source for health information. A previous study conducted at King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Science (KSAUHS) to assess the quality of online health information in Arabic language has fueled the motivation to establishing a comprehensive trusted health website in the Arabic and English languages. This initiative is called King Abdullah Arabic Health Encyclopedia (KAAHE) portal. This research is a continuation study which aims to assess the quality of online health portals in languages spoken in Asian countries other than Arabic and English, against Health on the Net (HON) standards and the results would be used to choose which languages to be added to KAAHE in order to widen its users’ group. This study is a quantitative cross-sectional prospective study. The criteria used to choose the languages for this study are based on the languages spoken in countries with the highest literacy and internet access rate in addition to highest population enumeration among Asian countries. Japan (Japanese language), South Korea (Korean language), Singapore (Chinese language) and Malaysia (Malay language) countries languages were chosen based on those criteria. Data collection methods used are: thru Saudi embassies in the selected countries, medical attaches and secretaries of the selected countries’ embassies in Saudi Arabia (in Riyadh, Diplomatic quarter), and local Google search engine in each country. After applying the refining process on the data collected, a simple random sampling technique is used to choose 10 portals for each language. The portals are assessed in terms of meeting HON international standards. The result is analyzed and shows variety quality level in meeting HON standards among the health portals. The assessment results show that Japanese health websites reach the highest compliance percentage among other languages’ health portals while Malaysian health websites were the lowest in reaching the compliance percentage against HON international standards.