Related Experiment Videos
Assisting consumer health information retrieval with query recommendations.
Qing T Zeng1, Jonathan Crowell, Robert M Plovnick
1Department of Radiology, Decision Systems Group, Thorn 309, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 75 Francis St, Boston, MA 02115, USA. qzeng@dsg.bwh.harvard.edu
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA
|October 14, 2005
Summary
The Health Information Query Assistant (HIQuA) tool improves health information retrieval by suggesting relevant terms, leading to more successful user queries online. This system aids consumers in forming better health-related search queries.
Area of Science:
- Information Science
- Health Informatics
- Human-Computer Interaction
Background:
- Internet health information retrieval (HIR) is crucial for millions.
- Many users struggle to formulate effective health-related search queries.
- Assistance in query formation can enhance the effectiveness of HIR.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop and evaluate a tool, the Health Information Query Assistant (HIQuA), to aid users in forming health-related queries.
- To assess the impact of HIQuA's query recommendations on the success of health information retrieval.
- To investigate whether HIQuA influences user satisfaction or task completion rates.
Main Methods:
- Developed the Health Information Query Assistant (HIQuA) system, which suggests semantically related query terms.
- Recommendations are based on concept co-occurrences in medical literature/log data and medical vocabularies.
- Conducted a randomized evaluation with 213 participants comparing HIQuA recommendations versus no recommendations.
Main Results:
- HIQuA recommendations significantly increased the success rate of health information retrieval queries (OR = 1.66, 95% CI = 1.16-2.38).
- No statistically significant impact was observed on user satisfaction.
- The system did not significantly affect users' ability to complete predefined retrieval tasks.
Conclusions:
- Semantic-distance-based query recommendations, like those from HIQuA, can effectively assist consumers in health information retrieval query formation.
- The findings suggest a practical approach to improving online health information seeking behavior.
- Further research may explore optimizing HIQuA for user satisfaction and task accomplishment.