The Quality of Online Medical Information Regardind Hypertension

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the completeness, accuracy and credibility of the medical information found online about hypertension and to compare the quality of the Romanian and English websites. This observational, cross-sectional study included 25 Romanian and 25 English websites. Pre-established inclusion and exclusion criteria were used for sample selection. Credibility was assessed using 12 criteria based on the eEurope 2002 expert recommendations. Completeness and accuracy of information were evaluated using a quality standard based on information from literature and guidelines. The credibility, completeness and accuracy scores were rated on a scale from 0 to 10. Student t test and Mann-Whitney U were used to compare the two languages subsamples. Spearman and Pearson’s tests were applied to test the correlations. The threshold for statistical significance was set at 0.05. The average credibility score was 4.7 for the Romanian websites and 5.6 for English websites (p=0.0686). The average completeness score was 3.7 for the Romanian websites and 5.3 for English websites (p=0.0007). The average accuracy score was 3.88 for the Romanian websites and 3.62 for English websites (p=0.5215). Significant moderate intensity correlation was found between the Google rank and the accuracy of the Romanian websites (r=-0.5438, p=0.0050). The overall quality scores of the Romanian and English websites presenting information about hypertension were modest. This study found a correlation between the Google rank and the accuracy score of the Romanian websites but since this was the only significant correlation, the findings are not sufficient to infer general recommendations. The study suggests that knowing both Romanian and English doesn't offer a significant advantage in accessing high-quality online information about hypertension. The Google rank cannot be used as a quality indicator since there is no consistent correlation between it and the quality scores.