EXPLORING HEALTH WEBSITE USERS BY WEB MINING

Abstract

With the continuous growth of health information on the Internet, providing user-orientated health service online has become a great challenge to health providers. Understanding the information needs of the users is the first step to providing tailored health service. The purpose of this study is to examine the navigation behavior of different user groups by extracting their search terms and to make some suggestions to reconstruct a website for more customized Web service. This study analyzed five months’ of daily access weblog files from one local health provider’s website, discovered the most popular general topics and health related topics, and compared the information search strategies for both patient/consumer and doctor groups. Our findings show that users are not searching health information as much as was thought. The top two health topics which patients are concerned about are children’s health and occupational health. Another topic that both user groups are interested in is medical records. Also, patients and doctors have different search strategies when looking for information on this website. Patients get back to the previous page more often, while doctors usually go to the final page directly and then leave the page without coming back. As a result, some suggestions to redesign and improve the website are discussed; a more intuitive portal and more customized links for both user groups are suggested.