March 4th, 2008
Credibility in online health care
One reason readers here respond so strongly — both positively and negatively — when I mention Google lies in how it finds things for you. (Picture from AlignedStrategy.Com.)
The PageRank algorithm, at its heart, is a popularity contest. If all the popular sites point to you then your site is ranked high. If few point to you, you’re not. It’s the wisdom of crowds.
Trouble is, sometimes crowds can be wrong. Take the Vitamin C cold cure, please. Sometimes popular people are wrong. John McCain is popular, but that doesn’t mean vaccines cause autism.
Many things are believed strongly yet are completely false. So professionals demand that students link to credible sites, and much of the battle among health care super-sites, like Healthline, concerns this question of credibility.
Sites like this try to assure credibility by linking carefully or becoming virtual cul-de-sacs, not linking at all, or linking only to internal resources.
Publishers who did this earlier in the Web’s history, like The New York Times, eventually found they had to loosen up.
Another way to earn credibility is through branding. When Microsoft links-up with the Mayo Clinic, or Google links with the Cleveland Clinic, there is branding taking place.
The techs are trafficking in credibility the hospitals earned, and the hospitals hope the techs will help them extend their missions. It’s a quid pro quo.
The aim of credibility is to reject crackpot cures and to assure readers that the advice they are getting is mainstream. That doesn’t mean it will still be accurate 30 years from now.
The whole Robert Jarvik brouhaha was, in the end, about credibility. Efforts by states to limit the swag doctors get from vendors is about credibility.
So the question becomes. Which online health sites do you find most credible, and why?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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