Theme
4AA eLearning courses
INSTITUTION
Department of Medical Education, College of Medicine, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
The aims of this study were to assess the scientific accuracy and the readability level of websites on bladder and kidney cancers.
The search engines Google®, Yahoo®, and Bing® were searched independently by three assessors in November 2014 using the following keywords: “bladder cancer”, “kidney cancer”, “patient bladder cancer”, “patient kidney cancer”, “bladder and kidney cancer”. Only English-language websites were selected on the bases of predetermined inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Assessors independently reviewed the findings and evaluated the quality of each website by using the DISCERN 1 and the LIDA 2 instruments (Box 1). The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level index and the Coleman-Liau Readability Index were used to caculate the readability.3 The inter-rater agreement betweeen asssesors was calculated using Cohen kappa.4
73 websites were finally included in the study. The overall accuracy scores varied; for the DISCERN the range was 27 to 76 (out of 80) and for the LIDA the range was 52 to 125 (out of 144).
The readability scores (mean±SD) were 10.5±0.61 for the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level index, and 11.1±0.74 for the Coleman-Liau Readability Index. There was a strong correlation between the readability scores obtained from the two calculations (R2 =0.66, p = 0.0001).
The inter-rater agreement between assesors had a Cohen kappa 0.478-0.948. The top 5 websites are shown in (Box 2).
In most websites there were deficiencies in clarity of aims and what would happen if no treatment is given. The readability met grade 10-11 literacy level.5
The accuracy and the quality of the websites on bladder and kidney cancers varied. The readability of most websites was above the public readability level.
The College of Medicine Research Center, Deanship of Scientific Research, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
1. Charnock, D. The DISCERN Handbook: Quality Criteria for Consumer Health Information http://www.discern.org.uk/index.php last accessed on August 11, 2015.
2. The Minervation validation instrument for healthcare websites,Version (1.2) http://www.minervation.com/lida-tool/#sthash.AkaOYdPd.dpuf last accessed on August 11, 2015.
3. Readability formulas website http://www.readabilityformulas.com last accessed on August 11, 2015.
4. Zhao H, Wang J, Liu X, Zhao X, Hippe DS, Cao Y, Wan J, Yuan C, Xu J. Assessment of Carotid Artery Atherosclerotic Disease by Using Three-dimensional Fast Black-Blood MR Imaging: Comparison with DSA. Radiology 2015;274:508-516
5. Ellimoottil C, Polcari A, Kadlec A, Gupta G. Readability of websites containing information about prostate cancer treatment options. J Urol. 2012;188:2171–2175.