The Health Improvement Institute (HII), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality and productivity of America’s health care, has just released a new report, “Quality of Health Information on the Internet—10 Years On: 2007 Workshop Report.” A decade after its 1997 workshop on the Internet and health care, HII held a workshop last fall that included representatives from 40 organizations in an effort to assess progress in the field and where the next decade might take us.

I was among the experts invited to present a perspective. I shared both my academic research on the evaluation of Internet health information quality (well summarized in the IxCenter white paper, “The Mysterious Maze of the World Wide Web: What Makes Internet Health Information High Quality?”) and the relationship of that to information therapy (Ix).

The HII report generated a series of recommendations for advancing the most effective use of the Internet for future health care improvement:

• • Personalize online health information to cater to consumers’ specific needs
  • Integrate the use of online health information with the provision of health care
  • Present information in ways that appeal to consumers of different cultures, health literacy levels, ages, and socio-economic statuses
  • Encourage health websites to identify themselves with company information and to make efforts to protect consumer privacy in order to create trust
  • Increase the transparency of the processes by which the quality of information is rated, a trust mark is granted, and/or evidence is gathered
  • Educate consumers to continue seeking information from trusted sources.

This is an excellent summary of where we need to go to maximize the potential of the Internet. It also speaks directly to the goals of Ix and the need to integrate Ix principles into new Internet tools and care delivery redesign strategies.

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