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Health Information Quality Paper

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Introduction Unvalidated Sources of Health Information (USHI) like health information presented through social network sites (SNS), blogs, forums, private websites and the likes proliferate the internet. Many times, the information on these platforms are incomplete, incorrect, outdated or plainly misleading and can be perilous to their consumers [1]. Patients, relatives of patients, or friends of patients utilize these platforms for a plethora of reasons ranging from guidance on major and minor health decisions to the desire for support from other users [30]. Support, as used here, could be emotional, social or financial and is usually gained by patients through the sharing of their personal medical issues, asking questions or sharing of …show more content…

Information Quality
Researchers have traditionally considered information quality to be informed by the accuracy, relevance, completeness, presentation and currency of information [25]. Information pieces that possess positive amounts of these factors when measure objectively are expected to have a high propensity for use to consumers [24, 25]. Interestingly, USHI’s success contradicts the traditional beliefs on information quality, thus, questioning the sufficiency of objective methods of measuring information quality in predicting the adoption and success of IS.
These are only some of the questions that the success of USHI poses to the research community. Some others concern the identification of design factors that engender users’ positive perception. Could the simplicity of the content, which are usually written in layman's terms, be an enabling factor? Is there an appealing design structure they employ? Also, understanding the characteristics of the adopters of these systems may provide useful insights to reasons for their vulnerability and how to curtail them or positively use them for other …show more content…

However, unlike other research that attempt to predict the adoption or success of technologies based on predefined constructs (antecedents), we argue that the most useful studies on USHI will be those that attempt to “reverse-engineer” its success, going even beyond standard antecedents with a view to identifying key components that inform those antecedents which in turn result in the success of the technology. This approach as proposed by Benbasat and Barki [26] for the technology acceptance model is believed to be able to help generate actionable information on how to “create” the antecedents to the desired success of information technology artifacts. Some applicable theories that can be reverse-engineered

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