Clinical websites are currently dangerous to health

Abstract

The Internet is becoming a ubiquitous medium, open to all. The paper explores the reasons why current health-related websites require extensive review and investment to ensure that they address the full spectrum of the audiences who may access their site. The audiences are no longer purely local or even solely those who work in the health domain. They will include everyone, from professional healthcare practitioners to members of the general public. The site web masters should also consider the range of purposes for which these disparate groups access the site. The language, content intensity and presentation should have a different style and be identified by its intended audience to avoid a range of problems including mis-interpretation, mis-targetting of content, mis-representation of source and quality. Inappropriate content and presentation could jeopardise the credibility of health sites, and thus healthcare provision, with the newly emerging audiences. Recent studies involving the evaluation of many web sites have assessed their ‘fitness for purpose’ as information repositories for different audiences. The criteria by which clinically related web contents are judged will vary, depending on the type of visitor to the site. Formal qualification of web content is ongoing—addressing both structured definition [1] and quality criteria [2]. Originators of web material should consider the full spectrum of the audiences who may access their site, from professional healthcare practitioners to members of the general public, and the purposes for which they access the site. The language, content intensity and presentation should have a different style and be identified by its intended audience to avoid a range of problems including mis-interpretation, mis-targetting of content, mis-representation of source and quality.