Rosetta Manaszewicz

User Centred Quality Health Information Provision: Benefits and Challenges

Recent research indicates people are increasingly looking to the Internet for health information. Equally however, there is increasing frustration with the sheer volume, lack of relevance and at times dubious quality of information retrieved. The Breast Cancer Knowledge Online project sought to build a user sensitive portal to assist women with breast cancer and their families overcome these problems and to facilitate the retrieval of information which would better meet the individual and changing needs of users. The research outcomes discussed in this paper describe the approach taken to building the metadata-driven portal, the outcome of usability testing of the portal, and the limitations of such an ambitious project.

Consumer empowerment through metadata-based information quality reporting: The Breast Cancer Knowledge Online Portal

An ink jet printing apparatus responsive to an input digital image for producing a halftone image on a receiver, such as a lithographic plate, having halftone dots with each halftone dot being formed by one or more microdots in a screen dot of selectable areas, including an adjustable printhead for delivering different volumes of ink droplets which, when they contact the receiver, forming microdots of different areas according to the selected screen dot size. The apparatus delivers ink to the printhead and is responsive to a selected screen dot size and the digital image to control the printhead to form ink droplets of different volumes to produce a halftone image on the receiver.This article is focused on the changes needed in design to create positive solutions for all involved in design processes. It draws upon the rich discussion and discourse from a conference focused on positive design involving managers, designers, and IT specialists, all focused on overcoming the problem-based focus and decision paradigms to enhance all phases of the design processes to develop sustainable solutions for real issues in a changing world. Therefore, all fields using design, consciously or not, including management, Information Communication Technology (ICT), and designers as well, need to redesign their processes and first rethink their design paradigms on a meta level.

A role for information portals as intelligent decision support systems: Breast Cancer Knowledge Online experience

In this chapter we review the knowledge-based view on decision support and argue the emergence of a new type of intelligent decision support system — an intelligent gateway for supporting specific knowledge needs. The modern view on decision support and expert systems has shifted from considering these as purely analytical tools for assessing best-decision options to seeing them as a more comprehensive environment for supporting efficient information processing based on a good understanding of the problem context. Such intelligent decision support systems incorporate problem-domain knowledge to improve their information processing and provision capabilities. More recently, information portals have been proposed as tools for matching users’ information needs in order to enhance their decision-making ability. This chapter looks at portals as new types of intelligent decision support systems, which use problem-domain knowledge in order to improve efficiency in information provision. The main focus of the chapter is on suggesting mechanisms for implementing intelligent decision support capabilities in a healthcare portal, which seeks to deliver personalized information to support efficient decision making. BCKOnline, a healthcare portal built around breast cancer information, is described as an example of such implementation.

The Role of Domain Expertise in Smart, User-Sensitive, Health Information Portals

The provision of consumer health information portals acting as gateways to online resources is one strategy for enabling patients to be better informed and engaged in healthcare decision making and support. These portals need to be both smart and user sensitive, able to identify and select resources of relevance to a user community, describe them in ways that facilitate user assessments of quality and relevance, and provide efficient and effective search functionality that can be tailored to individual information needs. The domain expertise required to select and describe resources in this manner is a key to the efficacy of such portals, with their viability dependent on the sustainability and scalability of their resource identification, selection and description processes. This paper reports on a study of the domain expertise involved with the provision of an information portal for a breast cancer community undertaken as part of the Smart Information Portal Project.

Bridging Communities Foundations For The Interchange Of Ideas

Research undertaken with ones own community can be complex and demanding. It can also be valuable and fulfilling. Those who take on this challenge must often straddle variant roles, values, and perspectives with the potential for the strictures and structures of the academic community to be at odds with those of the partner community in research endeavours. These ‘double insiders’ can be valued for their bridging capacity and insight. However, they are also likely to be called upon to negotiate or mediate expectations, tensions, and differences between the research partners. This paper takes a new approach to a complex issue that is being increasingly discussed inside the academy by employing an autoethnographical approach to examine, holistically, this kind of researcher positioning. This paper brings together researchers from three very different community contexts – women with breast cancer, Records Continuum researchers and practitioners, and Indigenous Australian communities – each pursuing diverse research projects related to information technology and recordkeeping. The recounting of each researchers story and the subsequent shared discussion of key issues that emerge from each story relating to research design, reflexivity, and reciprocity offer new insights and considerations for frameworks addressing community-based research.

Building a user sensitive intelligent portal to breast cancer knowledge to meet diverse information needs

The Internet provides access to a plethora of information, with health information being no exception. Portals for guiding users seeking health knowledge are proliferating. A major challenge in their development is filtering the information available in a user-sensitive way. The Breast Cancer Knowledge Online (BCKOnline) project addresses the challenge of meeting the diverse information needs of women with breast cancer and their families through the provision of timely, relevant and reliable information to support decision-making. This paper focuses on how the outcomes of user needs analysis and user-aware resource description will feed into building an intelligent portal prototype to breast cancer knowledge.