AB174. The computer will see you now—assessing the quality of information on gastric cancer on the Internet

Background: Increasingly, patients are consulting the internet for medical information, where the quality is highly variable. We must ensure patients are directed towards high quality websites. This is particularly true of gastric cancer (GC), a topic around which there is much uncertainty for patients and their families. We aimed to assess the information on GC available for patients on the internet.

Methods: We searched the top 3 search engines for “Gastric Cancer”. We analysed the top 20 websites returned by Google and the top 10 websites returned by Yahoo and Bing. All free, English language websites which did not require a password were included. We excluded paid advertisement websites and websites for medical professionals. Duplicate websites were removed. Each website was then evaluated using the The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) benchmark criteria, DISCERN tool, presence or absence of the Health On The Internet (HON) seal and the Gastric Cancer Specific Content Score (GCSCS).

Results: The average JAMA score was 1.55 with none of the twenty unique websites scoring the maximum of 4 points. The average DISCERN score was 54.8 (68.5%) with no website achieving the maximum of 80. The HON seal was present in only 6 websites (30%). The average GCSCS was 11 with only five websites achieving the maximum score of 13 (25%).

Conclusions: Whilst there are websites providing high quality information for patients in relation to GC our study has identified obvious issues of concern. We must ensure that only the highest quality information is available on the internet for patients.

Keywords: Gastric cancer; The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) benchmark; internet