Showing papers by "Alessandro D'Atri published in 2004"

A quality evaluation methodology of health web-pages for non-professionals.

Abstract: Primary objective: The proposal of an evaluation methodology for determining the quality of healthcare web sites for the dissemination of medical information to non-professionals.Methods and procedures: Three (macro) factors are considered for the quality evaluation: medical contents, accountability of the authors, and usability of the web site. Starting from two results in the literature the problem of whether or not to introduce a weighting function has been investigated. This methodology has been validated on a specialized information content, i.e., sore throats, due to the large interest such a topic enjoys with target users. The World Wide Web was accessed using a meta-search system merging several search engines. A statistical analysis was made to compare the proposed methodology with the obtained ranks of the sample web pages.Main outcome and results: The statistical analysis confirms that the variables examined (per item and sub factor) show substantially similar ranks and are capable of contribut...