Information Completeness: A Qualitative Analysis of Indoor Air Quality (IAQ)

Medical Information Quality

Healthcare consumers seek medical information to take better care of themselves and participate in a more informed way when they interact with a healthcare professional (Quintana, Feightner, Wathen, Sangster, & Marshall, 2001). In one study focusing on children requiring cardiac surgery for congenital heart disease, 58% used the Internet related to their child’s diagnosis and 74% used the Internet for educational purposes before their child’s diagnosis of congenital heart disease (Ikemba, et al., 2002). Traditionally, healthcare consumers read brochures, books, magazines or asked professionals to gain additional knowledge. Today, online medical information is readily available with many biomedical journals offering free Internet access as soon as articles are published or at least within the last two years of publication (Hundie, 2002). Weiler (2000) reported that two thirds of online users from the United States who searched for healthcare information reported success 90% of the time yet, there were few measures present to ensure accuracy (Weiler & Pealer, 2000). Unfortunately, information delivery channels may reflect inaccurate, incomplete and dated information that reaches users who have no way to evaluate the quality of the information they are receiving (Goldsborough, 2001).