Smart Online Searching To Increase Patient Safety

The spread of misinformation has been attributed to an increasingly digitalized and fractionalized information landscape.

In such a milieu, relevance-based online environments can create “alternative epistemologies”, spawning distinct ways of consuming information that can be shared by millions in so-called “epistemic communities”.

Information consumption and digital health literacy (ability to seek, understand, and appraise online health information) have a prominent effect on health outcomes and doctor-patient communication.

Our initiative aims to increase digital health literacy via the development of guidelines for “Smart Searching”: how to conduct well-rounded searches, judge the reliability of online content, warning signs of questionable trustworthiness, and practical techniques aiding informed decision-making.

These guidelines, primarily implemented in a browser extension scaffolding critical thinking, will be based on an empirical study examining how particular epistemic communities (anti-vax; users of alternative medicine) interact with online content and determine trustworthiness.

The study will be conducted with a methodological innovation that enables the integration of eye-movement, human-computer interaction, and qualitative data in order to triangulate data types and thus better understand cognitive processes in online behavior.

Our open source tool will comprise part of a larger kit: a unified qualitative-quantitative framework for integrating all three data types, a standard with which the tool can be implemented, and an open data depositing system.

The initiative’s pivotal objective is to increase digital health literacy among the general public and to create a reproducible and sustainable system for future research aimed at understanding online information-seeking behavior.

Gaining a deeper insight into information consumption within epistemic communities is essential in ensuring health equity and patient safety in a digitalized world.