HSWAI: a health sector website assessment instrument

Emerging technologies enable hospitals all over the world to improve their operation in order to become more efficient and effective. Despite all possible benefits of using those technologies, hospitals still struggle with problems of inefficiency of their websites’ operation. Nowadays, the patients use the health-related websites as an important information source and interaction point, therefore the assessment of hospital websites becomes a critical issue. In this paper, we present the process to reach an instrument for health sector website assessment. To identify the set of dimensions, indicators and sub-indicators, a qualitative research has been carried out using the Design Science Research (DSR) approach. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been used to derive the appropriate weights for dimensions and indicators. This methodology means an improvement on hospital websites assessments, by bringing website assessment closer to domain experts that are actual domain knowledge holders and to citizens who are the final users and service receivers.