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This study illustrates that differences across health-related websites, as well as different Internet usage patterns, have significant implications for how individuals view and interact with their health care providers.

We rely on a qualitative study of three health-related websites and an ordinary least squares regression analysis of survey data to explore how websites with different organizational motives frame health-related issues and how variations in Internet usage patterns affect patients’ perceptions of the patient-doctor interaction.

Results reveal differences across three health-related websites and show that both the number and the type of websites patients visit affect their perceptions of physicians’ responses. Specifically, visiting multiple websites decreased perceptions of how well doctors listened to or answered patients’ questions, whereas using nonprofit or government health-related websites increased evaluations of how well doctors listened to and answered questions.

This study suggests that practitioners and scholars should look more closely at how patients use the Internet to understand how it affects doctor-patient interactions. Future research could expand the analysis of website framing or use methods such as in-depth interviewing to more fully understand on-the-ground processes and mechanisms.

This study highlights the importance of fleshing out nuances about what it means to be an Internet-informed patient given that varying patterns of Internet use may affect how patients perceive their physicians.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the type of personalisation services satisfying the needs of cancer websites’ target users, and the influence of their emotional states on website usage intentions.

Three data collection methods were employed. Survey questionnaires were distributed to online health users. Interviews with representatives of the cancer-affected population further explored emotions as stimuli for online cancer-related activities. Finally, availability of personalisation features was evaluated on existing health websites in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the UK.

A clear preference emerged for personalisation on cancer-related websites. There are specific personalisation features the cancer-affected population desires. Interestingly, certain emotions were found to stimulate visits to health websites.

Fighting cancer implies constant support, including from cancer-related websites. It is thus vital to understand the required personalisation, stemming from target users’ actual needs, including the neglected user characteristics, as are emotions for cancer-affected people. This supports emotion-based personalisation.

The paper focusses on the cancer-affected population, and developing a comprehensive understanding of their personalisation needs in online health services. It further shows which emotions influence intentions to use cancer websites. The three concepts combined have not yet been studied, to the best of the authors’ knowledge.

This study aims to identify the critical factors affecting the perception of adolescent students toward interactive online mental health information available on health-related websites.

The primary data was collected with the help of an online self–structured questionnaire. The questionnaire includes the identified variables extracted from previous literature related to the mental health information websites using the Likert scale. The respondents include the adolescent school students belonging to the northern region of India: semi-urban/rural locations of Uttar Pradesh (Agra and Mathura) and urban cities (Faridabad, Gaziabad, Delhi and NCR). The criteria for selecting respondents were that students must have visited any online health information-related websites at least once. Exploratory factor analysis was used to explore the factors with the help of SPSS.20.

The identified factors that include information delivery medium/mode, websites’ navigation structure, customized information or content, ability to form a virtual relationship and supplementary features of the websites may benefit the health communication system of any country and the health-care industry.

There are some limitations such as a limited number of respondents and even on that sample was taken for teenagers; thereby creating fewer generalizations related to the present context. Further, only exploratory factor analysis is applied in the study to identify the factors but future researchers may proceed to develop the conceptual model of perception toward online information with the help of confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling techniques.

The results of this study are useful for government officials especially those related to the ministry of health care and public health organizations of various countries, who usually invest in co-designing authentic, reliable and high interactive online information-sharing websites.

The results of the study will facilitate the various social child welfare associations and non-governmental organizations that are usually involved in the holistic development of adolescents. The identified factors can be seriously taken into considerations by these associations while they are formulating any on line websites for sharing health-related information to adolescents.

The study is unique as it provides insight into the opinion of the adolescent students, primarily upon encountering the online mental health information concerning the Indian perspective. Future researchers, health-care policymakers and health-care professionals may use the study to capture a complete picture of a relevant phenomenon in their work.

This study aims to map the information landscape as it unfolds to users when they search for health topics on general search engines. Website sponsorship, platform type and linking patterns were analysed in order to advance the understanding of the provision of health information online.

The landscape was sampled by ten very different search queries and crawled with VOSON software. Drawing on Roger's framework of information politics on the web, the landscape is described on two levels. The front-end is examined qualitatively by assessing website sponsorship and platform type. On the back-end, linking patterns are analysed using hyperlink network analysis.

A vast majority of the websites have commercial and organisational sponsorship. The analysis of the platform type shows that health information is provided mainly on static homepages, informational portals and general news sites. A comparison of ten different health domains revealed substantial differences in their landscapes, related to domain-specific characteristics.

The size and properties of the web crawl were shaped by using third party software, and the generalisability of the results is limited by the selected search queries. Further research exploring how specific characteristics of different health domains shape provision of information online is suggested.

The demonstrated method can be used by organisations to discern the characteristics of the online information landscape in which they operate and to inform their business strategies.

The study examines health information landscapes on a large scale and makes an original contribution by comparing them across ten different health domains.

The purpose of this study was to analyse the hyperlinks leading to six teen health websites in order to assess the visibility of teen health web portals as well as to discover which websites refer teens to reliable health information.

An environmental scan of the web was conducted to find sample health websites for teens. Inlink data was gathered using Google Webmaster Tools, and the inlink sources were classified by the type of creator.

The teen health websites in this study had a low level of visibility on the web compared to general health web portals (such as Medline Plus, for example) and a weak level of referrals from health‐related groups compared to other organisations such as schools and public libraries. Many non‐healthcare related websites are linking to teen health information, demonstrating that teens' health information needs are being met by sources that lack expertise in health care.

Due to the small sample of six websites, generalisations beyond the context of the study are difficult to infer. The Google Webmaster inlink tool does not guarantee 100 per cent coverage and some inlinks may not have been captured by the tool, although this number is most likely minimal. The results of this study present a snapshot rather than an all‐inclusive view of the visibility of teen health websites and offer a starting point for further investigation.

The weak network of inlinks leading from reliable health care providers is a lost opportunity for health care professionals to reach young people.

Due to the weak network of inlinks from reliable health information sources, teens may not be accessing accurate and reliable health information. This could have a potential cost in terms of health outcomes.

The study investigates health information for teens, a population that increasingly uses the web as a source for health information. The authors used an approach that has not been used before in the study of teens and health information on the web.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the value of websites accessible to patients looking for Web-based information regarding hypertension management.

A cross-sectional research was carried out by finding out Malay and English language websites about hypertension. For this purpose, the keywords “hypertension and treatment” were entered on the Yahoo, Google, Ask.com, Bing and DuckDuckGo search engines, and the first five pages of the results obtained were inspected. The DISCERN tool was deployed for evaluating the quality of information. The actionability and understandability were assessed through the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool (PEMAT). Eight assessors were asked to assess and grade the involved websites.

Of the 216 websites, eight (4.0%) conformed to the inclusion norms. All websites were classified into private, 4 (50%); government, 2 (25%) and personal, 2 (25%). The general rating of the eight websites was good (mean 51.6 ± 8.2 on a 75-point scale); however, half of the websites were rated as fair (mean 45.3 ± 3.1 on a 75-point scale). All websites conformed to the standard score of ≥70% for understandability (mean 76.1 ± 11.4), but none for actionability (mean 52.8 ± 13.9). Analysis of variance indicated there was no statistical difference with regards to quality (p = 0.525), understandability (p = 0.484) and actionability (p = 0.188) among the three website sets.

Considering the surplus of websites dedicated to information on hypertension, an independent assessment of the quality of these websites will be advantageous. Patients should be rendered high understandability, quality and actionability to evade deceptive online information.

This paper proposes a framework that automatically assesses content coverage and information quality of health websites for end-users.

The study investigates the impact of textual and content-based features in predicting the quality of health-related texts. Content-based features were acquired using an evidence-based practice guideline in diabetes. A set of textual features inspired by professional health literacy guidelines and the features commonly used for assessing information quality in other domains were also used. In this study, 60 websites about type 2 diabetes were methodically selected for inclusion. Two general practitioners used DISCERN to assess each website in terms of its content coverage and quality.

The proposed framework outputs were compared with the experts' evaluation scores. The best accuracy was obtained as 88 and 92% with textual features and content-based features for coverage assessment respectively. When both types of features were used, the proposed framework achieved 90% accuracy. For information quality assessment, the content-based features resulted in a higher accuracy of 92% against 88% obtained using the textual features.

The experiments were conducted for websites about type 2 diabetes. As the whole process is costly and requires extensive expert human labelling, the study was carried out in a single domain. However, the methodology is generalizable to other health domains for which evidence-based practice guidelines are available.

Finding high-quality online health information is becoming increasingly difficult due to the high volume of information generated by non-experts in the area. The search engines fail to rank objective health websites higher within the search results. The proposed framework can aid search engine and information platform developers to implement better retrieval techniques, in turn, facilitating end-users' access to high-quality health information.

Erroneous, biased or partial health information is a serious problem for end-users who need access to objective information on their health problems. Such information may cause patients to stop their treatments provided by professionals. It might also have adverse financial implications by causing unnecessary expenditures on ineffective treatments. The ability to access high-quality health information has a positive effect on the health of both individuals and the whole society.

The paper demonstrates that automatic assessment of health websites is a domain-specific problem, which cannot be addressed with the general information quality assessment methodologies in the literature. Content coverage of health websites has also been studied in the health domain for the first time in the literature.

This study aims to examine the extent to which anti‐smoking websites use intervention strategies that have been informed by four prominent theories of health‐related behavior change: the health belief model, the theory of reasoned action/theory of planned behavior, the transtheoretical model, and social cognitive theory.

Content analysis was applied to 67 unique and independent anti‐smoking websites to determine their use of 20 intervention strategies based on the four theories.

The findings reveal that anti‐smoking websites used the health belief model the most and social cognitive theory the least. In addition, websites devoted to smoking cessation used these theories more extensively than websites devoted to smoking prevention.

The sample size is somewhat small, which may result in lack of sufficient statistical power. Also, the analysis may have overlooked some important intervention strategies that are particularly effective for smoking intervention programs.

Anti‐smoking website designers should take more advantage of the internet as a health promotion medium and use more intervention strategies that have been informed by scientifically tested theories of behavior change, particularly with respect to affective and behavioral strategies.

This study contributes to current knowledge about which kinds of anti‐smoking messages are available online and how extensively they employ theory‐based intervention strategies.

The effectiveness of a message and its attributes have become important for digital media. This study aims to investigate how different elements of a website including both argument-oriented and emotional stimuli based on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) can affect the issue involvement and change the attitude of the website visitors of a healthcare service provider.

The Ministry of Health and Education (MOHME) website was selected to explore how its content and design can persuade visitors. An online survey was conducted on 355 adults engaging in health protection behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis showed that one design element, i.e. website navigation and one social cue, i.e. social connectedness, have positive impact on issue involvement, while social presence and website satisfaction have a negative effect on issue involvement because of the random fluctuation suppressor effect. In addition, prior knowledge significantly influenced the issue's involvement. Further, website satisfaction has impacted attitudes directly. There was no significant relationship between argument quality and issue involvement.

Previous works have studied health-related behaviors in offline contexts; however, the scholars have not focused on the individuals' persuasion using ELM regarding the healthcare services provided in online communities. The results of the current study have theoretical and practical implications for scholars, website designers and policymakers.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate that when produced through relations of power, West Nile virus (WNV), as it exists on the Public Health Agency of Canada's (PHAC) website, is an effect of the kinds of knowledge, techniques of power, and disciplinary apparatuses that operate on the website and in society.

Methodology/approach – The approach used in the in-depth research project which informs this chapter is an elaboration of Michel Foucault's work on relations of power which offers an effective way of studying the PHAC's website as a collection of authoritative knowledges and as a product of a set of systems, structures, and processes which have helped to assemble and distribute knowledge about WNV.

Findings – The findings discussed in this chapter offer a critical reading of the PHAC's overall production of WNV, focusing particularly on its initial emergence starting in 2001. Cumulatively, this chapter argues that myriad relations of power have produced WNV as a bio-socio-administrative construct.

Contribution to the field – This research illustrates one way that Foucault's theories of power can be used to conduct a critical analysis of both the discursive and material dimensions of the production of contemporary public health issues. Such an approach is useful to scholars who wish to place the emergence of a disease phenomenon within political, institutional, economic, cultural, and social relations of power; thereby drawing attention to how specific spaces, places, individuals, and institutions contribute to the production of contemporary health alarms.