Quality of Internet Web Sites on Providing Patient Information on Peripheral Iridotomy
Purpose
The various resources available on the Internet provide patients with a means to educate and inform themselves on numerous medical conditions and associated treatments. As such, the purpose of this research is to systematically evaluate the quality of information available on websites when searching for ‘peripheral iridotomy’ and associated terms.
Methods
The term ‘peripheral iridotomy’ and five synonymous keywords were input into the Advanced Search Engine tool on ‘Google’ to compile the first 50 websites. These first 50 websites (five websites excluded due to videos or non-functional links) were evaluated using the Journal of American Medical Association’s instrument for assessing the quality of Internet resources. Each of the 50 websites was graded as either 0 or 1 for the categories of ‘Authorship’, ‘Attribution’, ‘Disclosure’ and ‘Last Updated’ by two blinded evaluators, resulting in cumulative scores ranging from 0 to 4.
Results
Of the 50 websites graded, 50% met criteria for ‘Authorship’, 30% met criteria for ‘Attribution’, 22% met criteria for ‘Disclosure’ and 56% met criteria for ‘Date Updated’. Calculation of cumulative scores for each website revealed 12% scored four points, 22% scored three points, 16% scored two points, 12% scored 1 point and 38% scored zero points. The top three categories of websites were personal ophthalmology centre/group websites, medical/ophthalmic information websites and journal affiliated websites, with 20, 14 and 9 websites, respectively. Between the two website evaluators, the intra-rater reproducibility of website grading was very high (kappa range 0.699-1.0).
Conclusion
Analysis of the 50 websites revealed that great variation exists in the quality of websites on peripheral iridotomy. As indicated by the results, only 12% of websites met all criteria established by the Journal of American Medical Association’s instrument for website evaluation, suggesting uncertainty regarding accuracy of website information.