ArticleBMC medical informatics and decision making2005
Portals to Wonderland: health portals lead to confusing information about the effects of health care.
Article in BMC medical informatics and decision making, 2005. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 71 citations in OpenAlex.
- Quality of information in news media reports about the effects of health interventions: Systematic review and meta-analyses.F1000Research · 2021Pooled it
- Who can you trust? A review of free online sources of "trustworthy" information about treatment effects for patients and the public.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2019Pooled it
- Interventions and assessment tools addressing key concepts people need to know to appraise claims about treatment effects: a systematic mapping review.Systematic reviews · 2016Pooled it
- Pooled it
- Trial
- Trial
- Promoting informed health choices: the long and winding road.Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · 2025Article
- An integrative systematic review on interventions to improve layperson's ability to identify trustworthy digital health information.PLOS digital health · 2024Article
- 2020 vision? A retrospective study of time-bound curative claims in British and Irish newspapers.The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners · 2022Article
- Frequency of Online Health Information Seeking and Types of Information Sought Among the General Chinese Population: Cross-sectional Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2021Article
- Article
- Development of mass media resources to improve the ability of parents of primary school children in Uganda to assess the trustworthiness of claims about the effects of treatments: a human-centred design approach.Pilot and feasibility studies · 2019Article
- Key Concepts for assessing claims about treatment effects and making well-informed treatment choices.F1000Research · 2018Article
- What Factors Impact Consumer Perception of the Effectiveness of Health Information Sites? An Investigation of the Korean National Health Information Portal.Journal of Korean medical science · 2017Article
- Article
- Measuring ability to assess claims about treatment effects: the development of the 'Claim Evaluation Tools'.BMJ open · 2017Article
- Article
- Development of a complex intervention to improve health literacy skills.Health information and libraries journal · 2013Article
- Nursing portal; a nursing informatics solution for iran, lessons learned from a comparative study.NI 2012 : 11th International Congress on Nursing Informatics, June 23-27, 2012, Montreal, Canada. International Congress in Nursing Informatics (11th : 2012 : Montreal, Quebec) · 2012Article
- SUPPORT Tools for evidence-informed health Policymaking (STP) 15: Engaging the public in evidence-informed policymaking.Health research policy and systems · 2009Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThe Internet offers a seemingly endless amount of health information of varying quality. Health portals, which provide entry points to quality-controlled collections of websites, have been hailed as a solution to this problem. The objective of this study is to assess the extent to which government-run health portals provide access to relevant, valid and understandable information about the effects of health care.
methodsWe selected eight clinically relevant questions for which there was a systematic review, searched four portals for answers, and compared the answers we found to the results of the systematic reviews.
resultsOur searches resulted in 3400 hits, 155 of which mentioned both the condition and the intervention in one of the eight questions. Sixty-three of the 155 web pages did not give any information about the effect of the intervention. Seventy-seven qualitatively described the effects of the intervention. Twenty-six of these had information that was too unclear to be categorised; 15 were not consistent with the systematic review; and 36 were consistent with the review, but usually did not mention what happens without the intervention, what outcomes have been measured or when they were measured. Fifteen web pages quantitatively described effects. Four of these were abstracts from the systematic review, nine had information that was incomplete and potentially misleading because of a lack of information about people not receiving the intervention and the length of follow-up; one had information that was consistent with the review, but only referred to three trials whereas the review included six; and one was consistent with the review.
conclusionInformation accessible through health portals is unlikely to be based on systematic reviews and is often unclear, incomplete and misleading. Portals are only as good as the websites they lead to. Investments in national health portals are unlikely to benefit consumers without investments in the production and maintenance of relevant, valid and understandable information to which the portals lead.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.