Readability of Websites Containing Information About Prostate Cancer Treatment Options

Ellimoottil, Chandy; Polcari, Anthony J.; Kadlec, Adam; Gupta, Gopal N.

doi:10.1016/j.juro.2012.07.105

Cited by 37 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Therefore, the American Medical Association and National Institutes of Health recommend that health education materials should be written at the fourth till sixth grade level [22]. Readability in our current series has improved significantly compared to a study of readability of websites on PCa treatment options published in 2012 that found a median Flesch Kincaid Grade Level of 12.0 [23]. Currently limited readability of online health information is therefore a crucial area for improvement in online PCa information.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Prostate Cancer on the Web—Expedient Tool for Patients’ Decision-Making?

et al. 2015

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Many patients diagnosed with cancer search for health information on the Web. We aimed to assess the quality and reliability of online health information on prostate cancer. Google, Yahoo, and Bing were searched for the term "prostate cancer." After selecting the most frequented websites, quality was measured by DISCERN score, JAMA benchmark criteria, and presence of HONcode certification. Popularity was assessed by Alexa tool, while accessibility, usability, and reliability were investigated by LIDA tool. Readability was analyzed by Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade Level and Automated Readability Index. All 13 selected websites were rated as being of high quality according to the DISCERN instrument (76.5 ± 2.6 out of 80 points). JAMA benchmark criteria were fulfilled by 87 % of websites, whereas only 37 % were certified by the HONcode. Median Alexa Traffic Rank was 2718 ranging from 7 to 679,038. Websites received 2.3 ± 0.5 daily pageviews per visitor and users spent an average of 2 min 58 s ± 39 sec on the website. Accessibility (92 ± 5 %) and usability (92 ± 3 %) scores were high and reliability (88 ± 8 %) moderate according to the LIDA tool. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level was 7.9 ± 2.2, and Automated Readability Index was 7.5 ± 2.4, rating the websites as fairly difficult to read. In conclusion, quality, accessibility, and usability of websites on prostate cancer provided a high rating in the current analysis. These findings are encouraging in view of the growing frequency of patients' access of health information online.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Prostate Cancer on the Web—Expedient Tool for Patients’ Decision-Making?

et al. 2015

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“…Zheng and Yu have reported on the readability of electronic health records compared to Wikipedia pages related to diabetes and found that readability measures often do not align with user ratings of readability [22]. A common finding of these studies is that, in general, health content available on Web pages is often hard to understand by the general public; this includes content that is retrieved in topranked positions by current commercial search engines [4,5,6,7,8,9].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These measures generally rely on surface-level characteristics of text, such as characters, syllables and word counts (missing citation). While these measures have been widely used in studies investigating the understandability of health content retrieved by search engines (e.g., [4,5,6,7,8,9,18,21]), our preliminary work found that these measures are heavily affected by the methods used to extract text from the HTML source [13]. We were able to identify specific settings of an HTML preprocessing pipeline that provided consistent estimates, but due to the lack of human assessments, we were not able to investigate how well each HTML preprocessing pipeline correlated with human assessments.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Consumer Health Search on the Web: Study of Web Page Understandability and Its Integration in Ranking Algorithms (Preprint)

Palotti¹,

Zuccon²,

Hanbury³

2018

Preprint

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Background: Understandability plays a key role in ensuring that people accessing health information are capable of gaining insights that can assist them with their health concerns and choices. The access to unclear or misleading information has been shown to negatively impact on the health decisions of the general public. Objective:We investigated methods to estimate the understandability of health Web pages and used these to improve the retrieval of information for people seeking health advice on the Web. Methods:Our investigation considered methods to automatically estimate the understandability of health information in Web pages, and it provided a thorough evaluation of these methods using human assessments as well as an analysis of preprocessing factors affecting understandability estimations, and associated pitfalls. Furthermore, lessons learnt for estimating Web page understandability were applied to the construction of retrieval methods with specific attention to retrieving information understandable by the general public. Results:We found that machine learning techniques were more suitable to estimate health Web page understandability than traditional readability formulae, which are often used as guidelines and benchmarking by health information providers on the Web (larger difference found for Pearson correlation of .602 using Gradient Boosting regressor compared to .438 using SMOG Index with CLEF 2015 collection). Learning to rank effectively exploited these estimates to provide the general public with more understandable search results ( H RBP ¿ reached 29.20, 22% higher than a BM25 baseline and 13% higher than the best system at CLEF 2016, both P≤ .001 ).

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“…Rosenberg analyzed the readability of web pages on different cancer types (breast, prostate, lung, and colon) and concluded that the majority of those web pages is too complex for the average patient [11]. Only about 5% of all web pages dealing with PCa have a reading level below high school reading level, thus physicians should advise and help patients to identify suitable web sources [13]. Betschart et al [15] evaluated the readability of patient education material published online by German-speaking associations of urology and found remarkable differences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accordance of Online Health Information on Prostate Cancer with the European Association of Urology Guidelines

et al. 2018

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Background: The internet is an emerging source of information for prostate cancer (PCa) patients. Since little is known about the quality of information on PCa provided online, we investigated its accordance to the latest European Association of Urology (EAU) guidelines. Methods: A total of 89 German web pages were included for analysis. A quality model classifying the provider of information and its expertise was introduced. Correctness of provided information was systematically compared to the EAU guidelines. Results: Information was provided by medical experts (41%), media (11%), and pharmaceutical companies (6%). Certificates were found in 23% with a significantly higher rate if provided by medical experts (p = 0.003). The minority of web pages showed information in accordance with the EAU guidelines regarding screening (63%), diagnosis (32%), classification (39%), therapy (36%), complications (8%), and follow-up (27%). Web pages by medical experts as well as websites with any kind of certification showed a significantly higher guideline conformity regarding diagnosis (p = 0.027, p = 0.002), therapy (p = 0.010, p = 0.011), follow-up (p = 0.005, p < 0.001), and availability of references (p = 0.017, p = 0.003). Conclusions: The present study reveals that online health information on PCa lacks concordance to current guidelines. Certified websites or websites provided by medical experts showed a significantly higher quality and accordance with guidelines.

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Readability of Websites Containing Information About Prostate Cancer Treatment Options

Cited by 37 publications

References 17 publications

Prostate Cancer on the Web—Expedient Tool for Patients’ Decision-Making?

Prostate Cancer on the Web—Expedient Tool for Patients’ Decision-Making?

Consumer Health Search on the Web: Study of Web Page Understandability and Its Integration in Ranking Algorithms (Preprint)

Accordance of Online Health Information on Prostate Cancer with the European Association of Urology Guidelines

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