Quality and Trust of Information Content and Credentialing

Definition

The quality and reliability of biomedical information is critical for practitioners (clinicians and biomedical scientists) to make important decisions about patient conditions and to draw key scientific conclusions towards developing new drugs, therapies and procedures. Evaluating the quality and trustworthiness of biomedical information [1] requires answering questions such as, where did the data come from, under what conditions was the data generated, how accurate and complete is the data, and so on.

Key Points

The quality and reliability of biomedical information is dependent on the task or the context of the application. There is a basic set of domain-independent features that can be used to characterize the quality and trustworthiness of the information:

Accuracy: The correctness of the information. Inherent noisiness in the underlying data generating clinical processes or biological experiments often leads to various errors in the resulting data. It is critical to...