A Prospective Analysis of Health Information Portals in Four Years

Objectives: We examined 17 health information portals to determine the status of web-based health information services in the United States (USA), South Korea, the United Kingdom (UK), and Australia. Methods: We analyzed longitudinal trends in 35 items of online health information over four years among representative health information portals (eight based in the USA, seven in South Korea, one in the UK, and one in Australia), focusing on external portal structure, content scope, service characteristic, and service function with four stakeholder groups of six stakeholders. Results: The most notable change was in the service items, and overall, in 44.1% of total items: 17.6% in service characteristic, 41.2% in external portal structure, 58.8% in service function, and 58.8% in content scope change. More specifically, these changes included increases in the “mobile application utility” (service function), “use of personal health records” on public health portals (content scope change), “Charts and videos” (service characteristic), and “renewal date” (external portal structure). Conclusions: This review of existing health portals will be a footnote for enabling health care providers to confirm whether the needs of consumers are reflected on their website with high reliability. Furthermore, these findings will help to enhance the quality of portals by delivering relevant information to stakeholders and to the consumers of online health information.