Improving service of online health information provision: A case of usage-driven design for health information portals | Information Systems Frontiers Skip to main content
Springer Nature Link
Log in

Improving service of online health information provision: A case of usage-driven design for health information portals

  • Published:
Information Systems Frontiers Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Health information portals (HIPs) are now well-established channels for providing reliable and relevant health information as a service to health information consumers. The concept of a smart health information portal was proposed to improve the search experience of HIP users, advancing HIPs learning capability by looking at usage data. This paper describes a design-science research project which utilized insights from usage data to address search issues. A conceptual approach and an architecture to enable usage-driven capability are described. We propose two specific applications, a HIP-specific content issue reporting tool and a topic search feature, to demonstrate how usage data can enhance HIP operations and users’ search experience. Based on the demonstrated implementations and empirical analysis, this paper also discusses how usage-driven design can lead to improved service in online health information provision.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
¥17,985 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price includes VAT (Japan)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Burstein, F. & Gregor, S. (1999). The systems development or engineering approach to research in information systems: an action research perspective. Australasian Conference on Information Systems, Wellington, New Zealand.

  • Burstein, F., Fisher, J., McKemmish, S., Manaszewicz, R. & Malhotra, P. (2005). User centred quality health information provision: benefits and challenges. Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Big Island, HI, USA.

  • Burstein, F., Mckemmish, S., Fisher, J., Manaszewicz, R. & Malhotra, P. (2006). A role for information portals as intelligent decision support systems: breast cancer knowledge online experience. Intelligent Decision-making Support Systems: 359–383.

  • Chen, H., Lally, A. M., Zhu, B., & Chau, M. (2003). HelpfulMed: intelligent searching for medical information over the internet. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(7), 683–694.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chesbrough, H., & Spohrer, J. (2006). A research manifesto for services science. Communications of the ACM, 49(7), 35–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Christensen, H., & Griffiths, K. (2000). The Internet and mental health literacy. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 34(6), 975–979.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cline, R. J. W., & Haynes, K. M. (2001). Consumer health information seeking on the internet: the state of the art. Health Education Research, 16(6), 671–692.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coiera, E., & Hovenga, E. (2007). Building a sustainable health system. IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics, 2(1), 11–18.

  • De Silva, D., Burstein, F. & Fisher, J. (2012). Supporting personalised content management in smart health information portals. Australasian Conference on Information Systems, Geelong, Australia.

  • Evans, J., Manaszewicz, R. & Xie, J. (2009). The role of domain expertise in smart, user-sensitive, health information portals Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HI, USA.

  • Few, S. (2006). Information dashboard design: the effective visual communication of data, 1st edition: O'Reilly Media, Inc.

  • Fidel, R. (1994). User-centered indexing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 45(8), 572–576.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fisher, J., Burstein, F., Manaszewicz, R. & Lazarenko, K. (2009). Health information portals: how can we improve the user's search experience? 17th European Conference on Information Systems, Verona, Italy.

  • Fox, S. (2012). Pew Internet: Health. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved 5 June 2013, from http://www.usdmp.us/uploaded_files/Pew Internet.pdf.

  • Garde, S., Hullin, C. M., Chen, R., Schuler, T., Granz, J., Knaup, P. & Hovenga, E. J. S. (2007) Towards sustainability of health information systems: how can we define, measure and achieve it? Medinfo 2007, Brisbane, Australia.

  • Gregor, S., & Jones, D. (2007). The anatomy of a design theory. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 8(5), 312–335.

  • Golinelli, G. M. (2008). L’approccio sistemico al governo di impresa - Verso la scientificazione dell’azione di governo. Padova: CEDAM.

  • Gregor, S. (2006). The nature of theory in information systems. MIS Quarterly, 30(3), 611–642.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haase, P., Hotho, A., Schmidt-Thieme, L. & Sure, Y. (2005). Collaborative and usage-driven evolution of personal ontologies. The semantic web: research and applications: 125–226.

  • Hersh, W. R. (2009). Information retrieval: a health and biomedical perspective (3rd ed.). New York: Springer Verlag.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Herskovic, J., Tanaka, L. Y., Hersh, W., & Bernstam, E. V. (2007). A day in the life of pubmed: analysis of a typical day’s query log. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 14), 212–220.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hevner, A., March, S., Park, J., & Ram, S. (2004). Design science in information systems research. MIS Quarterly, 28(1), 75–105.

    Google Scholar 

  • Josefsson, U. (2006). Exploring E-patents’ heterogeneity: towards personalized e-health applications. 14th European Conference on Information Systems, Göteborg, Sweden.

  • Keselman, A., Logan, R., Smith, C. A., Leroy, G., & Zeng-treitler, Q. (2008). Developing informatics tools and strategies for consumer-centered health communication. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 15(4), 473–483.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Klein, R. (2007). An empirical examination of patient-physician portal acceptance. European Journal of Information Systems, 16(6), 751–760.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Konstas, I., Stathopoulos, V. & Jose, J. M. (2009). On social networks and collaborative recommendation. Proceedings of the 32nd international ACM SIGIR conference, Boston, MA, USA.

  • Luo, W., & Najdawi, M. (2004). Trust-building measures: a review of consumer health portals. Communications of the ACM, 47(1), 108–113.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Madle, G., Kostkova, P., Mani-Saada, J., & Roy, A. (2006). Lessons learned from evaluation of the use of the National electronic Library of Infection. Health Informatics Journal, 12(2), 137–151.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Maglio, P. P., & Spohrer, J. (2008). Fundamentals of service science. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36(1), 18–20.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McCray, A., Ide, N., Loane, R.& Tse, T. (2004). Strategies for supporting consumer health information seeking. Medinfo 2004, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

  • McKemmish, S., Manaszewicz, R., Burstein, F., & Fisher, J. (2009). Consumer empowerment through metadata-based information quality reporting: the breast cancer knowledge online portal. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(9), 1792–1807.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Miller, N., Lacroix, E. M., & Backus, J. E. B. (2000). MEDLINEplus: building and maintaining the National Library of Medicine's consumer health Web service. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 88(1), 11.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mühlen, M., & Shapiro, R. (2010). Business process analytics. Handbook on Business Process Management, 2, 137–157.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Murray, M. (2002). An investigation of specifications for migrating to a web portal framework for the dissemination of health information within a public health network. Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HI, USA.

  • Ng, I., Maull, R. & Smith, L. (2011). Embedding the new discipline of service science, in The Science of Service Systems, Springer: 13–35.

  • Nguyen, V. B., Burstein, F., Fisher, J. & Wilson, C. (2011). Taxonomy of usage problems for improving user-centric online health information provision. Proceedings of the 17th Americas Conference on Information Systems, Detroit, Michigan.

  • Nunamaker, J. F. & Chen, M. (1990). Systems development in information systems research. Proceedings of the 23rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Kailua-Kona, HI, USA.

  • Peffers, K., Tuunanen, T., Rothenberger, M. A., & Chatterjee, S. (2007). A design science research methodology for information systems research. Journal of Management Information Systems, 24(3), 45–77.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Quintana, Y. (1998). Intelligent medical information filtering. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 51(2), 197–204.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sassene, M. J. & Hertzum, M. (2009). Incompatible images: Asthmatics’ non-use of an e-health system for asthma self-management. Patient-Centered E-Health: 186–200.

  • Soualmia, L. F., & Darmoni, S. J. (2005). Combining different standards and different approaches for health information retrieval in a quality-controlled gateway. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 74(2–4), 141–150.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spohrer, J., Maglio, P. P., Bailey, J., & Gruhl, D. (2007). Steps toward a science of service systems. Computer, 40(1), 71–77.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stojanovic, N., Stojanovic, L. & Gonzalez, J. (2002). On enhancing searching for information in an information portal by tracking users’ activities. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (Workshops), Singapore, IEEE Computer Society.

  • Stojanovic, N., Gonzalez, J. & Stojanovic, L. (2003). ONTOLOGER: a system for usage-driven management of ontology-based information portals. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Knowledge Capture, Sanibel Island, FL, USA.

  • Turner, A., Fraser, V., Muir Gray, J., & Toth, B. (2002). A first class knowledge service: developing the National electronic Library for Health. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 19(3), 133–145.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vargo, S. L. (2006). The service-dominant logic of marketing: dialog, debate, and directions, in, ME Sharpe (eds): Armonk, NY: 43–56.

  • Vargo, S. L., & Akaka, M. A. (2009). Service-dominant logic as a foundation for service science: clarifications. Service Science, 1(1), 32–41.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vargo, S. L., Maglio, P. P., & Akaka, M. A. (2008). On value and value co-creation: a service systems and service logic perspective. European Management Journal, 26(3), 145–152.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Xie, J. (2009). Sustaining quality assessment processes in user-centred health information portals. Proceedings of the 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems, San Francisco, California.

  • Zeng, Q. T., & Tse, T. (2006). Exploring and developing consumer health vocabularies. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 13(1), 24–29.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zeng, Q. T., Kogan, S., Plovnick, R. M., Crowell, J., Lacroix, E. M., & Greenes, R. A. (2004). Positive attitudes and failed queries: an exploration of the conundrums of consumer health information retrieval. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 73(1), 45–55.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zeng, Q. T., Crowell, J., Plovnick, R. M., Kim, E., Ngo, L., & Dibble, E. (2006). Assisting consumer health information retrieval with query recommendations. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 13(1), 80–90.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhang, J., Wolfram, D., Wang, P., Hong, Y., & Gillis, R. (2008). Visualization of health subject analysis based on query term co occurrences. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(12), 1933–1947.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This research is supported by grants from the Telematics Trust and Helen Macpherson Smith Trust, project: Breast Cancer Knowledge Online Portal.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Bang Viet Nguyen, Frada Burstein & Julie Fisher

Authors
  1. Bang Viet Nguyen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Frada Burstein
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Julie Fisher
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Julie Fisher.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Nguyen, B.V., Burstein, F. & Fisher, J. Improving service of online health information provision: A case of usage-driven design for health information portals. Inf Syst Front 17, 493–511 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-014-9507-4

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-014-9507-4

Keywords

Search

Navigation