The Role of Domain Expertise in Smart, User-Sensitive, Health Information Portals

The provision of consumer health information portals acting as gateways to online resources is one strategy for enabling patients to be better informed and engaged in healthcare decision making and support. These portals need to be both smart and user sensitive, able to identify and select resources of relevance to a user community, describe them in ways that facilitate user assessments of quality and relevance, and provide efficient and effective search functionality that can be tailored to individual information needs. The domain expertise required to select and describe resources in this manner is a key to the efficacy of such portals, with their viability dependent on the sustainability and scalability of their resource identification, selection and description processes. This paper reports on a study of the domain expertise involved with the provision of an information portal for a breast cancer community undertaken as part of the Smart Information Portal Project.