What's to Learn from Unvalidated Sources of Health Information?

Unvalidated Sources of Health Information (USHI) have been very successful in spite of the risk they pose to the health and well-being of their users. Our goal is to present a framework for the future study of USHI that studies the basic factors responsible for its success so as to enable the creation of better strategies to curb their use. Such studies leading to the identification of the components of USHI's success can be useful in improving the design of other less adopted consumer healthcare systems. To achieve this goal, we suggest the "reverse-engineering" of various information technology (IT) adoption and success theories to identify the actionable components of their antecedents with respect to USHI that can be directly useful to designers of IT artifacts. We also speculate on several potential benefits of such research beyond addressing the threat USHI represents.