Andrea Civan

Personal health information management

Integrating personal health information helps people manage their lives and actively participate in their own health care.

The personal project planner: planning to organize personal information

Prototyping and evaluation combine to explore ways that an effective, integrative organization of project-related information might emerge as a by-product of a persons efforts to plan a project. The Personal Project Planner works as an extension to the file manager -- providing people with rich-text overlays to their information. Document-like project plans provide a context in which to create or reference documents, email messages, web pages, etc. that are needed to complete the plan. The user can later locate an information item such as an email message with reference to the plan (e.g., as an alternative to searching through the inbox or sent mail). Results of an interim evaluation of the Planner are very promising and suggest special directions of focus for limited available prototyping resources.

Supporting Consumers by Characterizing the Quality of Online Health Information: A Multidimensional Framework

Health care consumers increasingly turn to the World Wide Web for health information to support active participation in their health care. Use of the best health information requires consumers to assess the quality of this information. However, consumers face a number of challenges in their online health searches as well as in their use of quality appraisal tools. Our review and synthesis of health information quality appraisal methods reveals a novel model for characterizing the quality of health information from multiple dimensions. Content, usage, authorship, and publication characteristics provide consumers with an organizing framework for assessment that can be suited to match a variety of needs, purposes, and characteristics. New informatics tools that describe quality in multiple ways could meet the needs of consumers by highlighting these multiple dimensions. We present a usage case example and prototype using our Multidimensional Quality Framework to visualize the quality of MEDLINE search results.