Professional paper
The Consistency of Medical Information on Internet
Miroslav Mađarić
orcid.org/0000-0001-7386-8888
; Croatian Society for Medical Informatics, Zagreb, Croatia
Vesna Nesek-Mađarić
; Croatian Chamber of Physicians, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Author conducted the review of several Internet based information sources which combine symptoms and underlying causes (diagnoses, diseases). The base was the experience with the Mayo Clinic portal for patients https://www.mayoclinic.org/symptoms2 . It was found that the view to this information is not consistent in relation to the other-way-around view in https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions , where in one symptom description all related diseases (diagnoses) should be listed. The symptom mentioned can be seen in “diseases view” (diagnosis “Amyloidosis”). The opposite “symptoms view” for “weight loss” does not yield diagnosis “amyloidosis” in the list of dozens of diagnoses listed. In Mayo Clinic portal this inconsistency is overall practice: the same applies for “amyloidosis” also for the symptom “leg swelling” etc, but also for other diagnoses and symptoms. Author further examined other popular health portals: WebMD 3, MSD-Priručnici 4 (Croatia), PatientsLikeMe6 and NHS5. Based on this research the finding was unanimous: there is obvious lack of consistency between categories symptoms and diseases/conditions. In addition, in almost every source mentioned, inconsistencies in terminology were observed. Author concludes that the cause of this shortcoming are obviously two separate sources of information: separate databases for diagnoses and another for symptoms. Therefore, the author finally recommends fixing these shortcomings. Implementing such improvements, “diagnosing wandering” can be substantially reduced, being advantageous for obtaining straightforward path in diagnostic process in many cases.
Keywords
Case study; Amyloidosis on portal of Mayo Clinic
Hrčak ID:
273567
URI
Publication date:
3.3.2022.
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