An objective scoring system to evaluate the credibility of health related websites

Introduction and aim: The unreliable quality of online health contents poses a serious challenge to the medical profession. Evaluating websites on the basis of their credibility increases the chance for readers to access professional content of better quality. Hungary still lags behind in taking practical steps to improve the quality and reliability of online patient education. Method: EgeszsegKommando (HealthCommando) is a new Hungarian objective scoring system established to evaluate the credibility of health related websites. It uses four types of indicators: transparency, content, recommendations, references. Results: We evaluated 122 websites with EgeszsegKommando. Out of this, 22.1% qualified as credible. The same assessment using JAMA benchmarks yielded only one credible website (0.8%). The most frequent deficiencies were the absence of reference to source, the omission of the quote that "the website information does not replace the doctor-patient discussion", and the identity of the author. In 45.9% of the cases, however, the content was written by medical professionals with contact information. Conclusion: By applying different types of credibility and quality indicators in a scoring system, EgeszsegKommando can efficiently assess the websites on health-awareness. In cases where the recognized indicators are absent multiple times from a website, it will not pass the credibility test. Thus, EgeszegKommando can act as a filter. At the same time, EgeszsegKommando is also capable of assessing webpages of different sorts systemically, and can recommend a proportionately large amount of reliable Hungarian medical web resources to those interested.