Ileoanal Pouch Surgery Online Patient Resources: An Assessment of Quality and Readability

Background:
The purpose was to assess the quality and readability of online information regarding J-pouch surgery across academic, commercial, and foundation/advocacy websites.
Methods:
A web search was conducted in September 2024 using Google, Yahoo, and Bing to extract the first 20 websites from each search engine using the following search terms: ‘J-pouch surgery’. Python libraries, including “requests” and “BeautifulSoup”, were used for web scraping and extracting relevant URLs. Websites were categorized as academic, commercial/for-profit, or foundation/advocacy. Educational material in PDF format that required registration for access was excluded from evaluation of quality. Quality was assessed using the JAMA Benchmark Criteria (scored from 0 to 4, with a score of 4 indicating that all criteria—authorship, attribution, disclosure, and currency—are met), the DISCERN Tool (scored from 16 to 80, with higher scores reflecting greater quality and reliability of health information) and the Flesch Reading Ease Score (scored from 0 to 100, where higher scores indicate easier readability). One-way ANOVA with post-hoc analysis was conducted using R to compare mean scores between categories. Figures represent mean ± standard deviation.
Results:
After manual deduplication and applying exclusion criteria (websites for health professionals, blogs, and PDFs), 11 sites were included in the final analysis. The mean JAMA score was 2.45 ± 1.03, DISCERN 51.1 ± 9.76, and Flesch 49.3 ± 10.5. Higher JAMA scores were observed in commercial/for-profit (mean = 3 ± 0) and foundation/advocacy sites (mean = 3 ± 0) compared to academic sites had lower scores (mean = 2 ± 0.90), p>0.05. DISCERN scores were highest for commercial sites (58.3) compared to academic (48.7) and foundation/advocacy (47.5). Flesch reading scores were highest for academic sites (53.6) compared to commercial (47.2) and foundation/advocacy (39.5). No statistically significant differences were found across categories.
Conclusions:
Although the overall quality of J-pouch surgery websites was moderate, disclosure and evidence quality remain areas with opportunity for improvement.