Measuring Quality and Impact of Quality Framework for Consumer Healthcare Websites

Website becomes an important tool for organizations to put their product online. Similarly, health care organizations allow to serve their patients online as well as to deliver information. In Ethiopia, healthcare providers have websites even though the usages of the website by end-users are not become familiar due to their interpretation on the standard of the existing website. The objective of this study is to develop a website quality evaluation framework for Ethiopian healthcare organizations which is used as guidelines for developers of healthcare website in Ethiopia. To develop the framework an extensive literature study was done on quality models, design guidelines, accessibility guidelines to identify characteristics, sub-characteristics and quality indicators. The proposed framework (HWebQE) was tested on three Ethiopian healthcare providers’ website as case study using questionnaire prepared from the quality indicators. The results of this study show that the overall qualities of the available Ethiopian healthcare provider’s website are in the moderate quality level.