e-health | Acta Medica Marisiensis

General Characteristics and Quality of Stroke-Related Online Information – A Cross-Sectional Assessment of the Romanian and Hungarian Websites

Septimiu Daniel Popescu¹, Alex Otniel Popescu², Mihaela Dănilă³, Mihaela Dobria², David Maior², Valentin Nădăşan⁴

1. Department of Radiology and Imaging, Emergency County Hospital Tirgu Mures, Romania
2. University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Tirgu Mures, Romania
3. Cardiovascular and Transplant Emergency Institute, Tirgu Mures, Romania
4. Department of Hygiene, University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Tirgu Mures, Romania

DOI: 10.2478/amma-2018-0023

Background: The quality of online health-related information may affect users’ understanding and medical decision-making with dramatic impact, particularly in case of stroke.
Objective: The objective of this study was to assess the quality of information about stroke on the Romanian and Hungarian websites in terms of completeness and accuracy.
Methods: The research was designed as an observational cross-sectional study. The sample included 25 Romanian and 25 Hungarian websites presenting information about stroke for the general public. General characteristics such as website ownership, main goal, website genre and medical approach were identified by the evaluators using a predetermined set of common instructions. The completeness and accuracy of the information were assessed by two independent assessors against a quality benchmark.
Results: Overall, most of the websites were owned by private commercial companies (42%), had educational goal (66%), were designed as medical web-portals (46%) and had a conventional medicine approach (72%). Mean completeness score was 5.6 points (SD± 1.9) for Romanian sites and 4.1 points (SD ± 2.4) for Hungarian sites (p = 0.017). Mean accuracy score was 6.2 points (SD ± 1.1) for Romanian sites and 7.0 points (SD ± 0.7) for Hungarian sites (p = 0.02).
Conclusions: The information about stroke on the Romanian and Hungarian websites had poor quality. Although we found statistically significant differences between the quality scores of the two language sub-samples and two site characteristics associated with significantly higher quality, the practical relevance of these findings for online health information seekers should be interpreted with caution.

General Characteristics of the Romanian Medical Webscape

Nădăşan V.¹, Ancuceanu R.², Tarcea Monica³, Grosar C.M.⁴, Ureche Ramona³

1 Editura Prisma, Tîrgu Mureş
2 Department of Pharmaceutical Botany and Cell Biology, University of Medicine and Pharmacy “Carol Davila”, Bucharest
3 Hygiene Department, University of Medicine anf Pharmacy, Tîrgu Mureş
4 “Am Brunnenberg” Rehabilitation Hospital, Bad Elster, Germany

Background: Although the percentage of Romanians who use the Internet to find health information is 16% and the proportion of Romanians looking for health information on the web has tripled from 2006 to 2009, no attempt has been made so far to assess the quality of information in the Romanian medical webscape.
Aim: The present study aimed to evaluate some general characteristics of the Romanian health related websites.
Methods: We investigated a sample of 317 medical sites randomly selected from the largest Romanian web directory. Two of the authors collected independently data about the number of unique visitors/month, medical specialty, site ownership, main purpose of the site and target audience. Disagreements were identified and a final common decision was taken by the evaluators through consensus.
Results: Our results suggest that the Romanian medical webscape represents a relatively small portion of the Romanian webscape. In terms of number of sites, we found that the most prominent categories were the complementary and alternative medicine sites and multispecialty sites ranking first and second respectively. With more then 80% of the total traffic recorded by the medical websites, multispecialty sites clearly dominate the virtual health space. A very small number of medical websites have a real potential to influence health
information seeking Internet users, since almost 90% of the medical websites draw an insignificant number of visitors.
Conclusions: The results of our study might be representative beyond its statistical population to the general Romanian webscape but this has yet to be verified.