OHI and User Trust

In this month's release of the Internet Initiative Newsletter, Ankur Chattopadhyay and Katie L. Turkiewicz discuss OHI and trust in their article titled Future Directions in Online Healthcare Consumerism Policy Making: Exploring Trust Attributes of Online Healthcare Information.

The Internet provides access to a trove of information on many topics, health care included. As Internet Access increases, so too does our reliance on it for information not traditionally available to the average person, information that was conventionally vetted by professionals whose place it was to disseminate the most relevant parts of that information to us.

While access to information for the average citizen is a valuable social asset, especially when it comes to health information, the availability and magnitude of that information is often overwhelming and can lead to a condition known as Cyberchondria where the difficulty and psychological distress inherent in self-diagnosing symptoms becomes detrimental to the user.

 In their article, Chattopadhyay and Turkiewicz explore the lack of standardization in setting guidelines of credibility for OHI towards helping users make informed trust decisions online.

Based on the points made in the Chattopadhyay/Turkiewicz article, how do you feel IEEE, as a standards organization, can best contribute to practices of standardization in OHI towards better leveraging user trust?