AB254. Trochanteric bursitis: a quality analysis of internet-based information of a common hip pathology

Background: Trochanteric bursitis is one of the most common causes of lateral hip pain in adults. The prevalence of unilateral trochanteric bursitis is 15.0% in women and 8.5% in men. Access to internet based information has increased dramatically and health related information is now one of the most popular searches in online activity, despite this the quality of information can vary. The objective of this paper is to examine the quality and readability of internet based information of trochanteric bursitis.

Methods: Websites were identified using the search term “trochanteric bursitis” and the first 50 websites from the top five separate search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask and duckduckgo) were selected. After excluding duplicate websites, 114 of the total 250 websites were evaluated. The website authorship was then classified as: academic, physician, medico-legal, commercial, social media/ discussion, hospital, non-physician or unspecified. Readability was assessed using the Flesh Reading Ease score and Flesh-Kincaid grade level. The quality of each website was calculated using the DISCERN tool and The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) benchmark criteria. We also assessed for the presence of HON-code certification which is now broadly recognised as an ethical code for medical web sites.

Results: The mean DISCERN, JAMA, Flesh Reading Ease score and Flesh-Kincaid grade level values of academic, physician and hospital sites was 44.62, 1.8, 46.28 and 8.55 respectively. Whilst the mean DISCERN, JAMA, Flesh Reading Ease score and Flesh-Kincaid grade level values of medico-legal, commercial, discussion/social media, non-physician and unspecified sites were 30.62, 0.375, 51.34 and 8.31 respectively. Thirteen percent of the websites had HON code certification, all of which belonged to the academic, physician and hospital authored websites.

Conclusions: Overall, we have found a high variability among not only the quality but also the readability of information published. Websites that appeared first on each search engine for trochanteric bursitis did not necessarily score better, demonstrating the importance of providing patients with high quality resources. Future articles should use more critical appraisal tools in order to provide the reader with more high quality and readable information.

Keywords: Trochanteric bursitis; internet; consumer health information; evaluation studies