Healthcare organizations' websites: are they effective in communicating to general people?
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•67 views
Presented at the ICIC 2018 (Utrecht) on the 23rd of May.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Healthcare organizations' websites: are they effective in communicating to general people?
Similar to Healthcare organizations' websites: are they effective in communicating to general people? (20)
More from Sabina De Rosis
More from Sabina De Rosis (6)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Healthcare organizations' websites: are they effective in communicating to general people?
- 1. The online communication of healthcare organisations trough their websites in Italy Sabina De Rosis, PhD sabina.derosis@santannapisa.it Management and Healthcare Laboratory Management Institute Sant’Anna School - Pisa POSTER 185 – Grand Hall
- 3. «Currently, health systems and knowledge about health and healthcare places complex demands on patients and populations and asks them to take on new roles in seeking information, understanding their rights and responsibilities and making health decisions for themselves and others. (WHO, 2015) «Collaborative co-production requires users to be experts in their own circumstances and capable of making decisions, while professionals must move from being fixers to facilitators» (Realpe & Wallace, 2010) The quality and “usability” of information provided by the healthcare organizations online appear very important, in order to contributing in avoiding the risks of fake news as well as of a misunderstanding of information. The websites can be used as a powerful channel for improving the access to care, the use of healthcare services, the health literacy and the empowerment of people.
- 4. 167 healthcare organizations’ websites from 13 Italian Regions were analyzed on December 2016, investigating if the texts on the websites are readable and comprehensible for people with different levels of education and different levels of literacy, by using the Gulpease Index and the Italian Fundamental Vocabulary (IFV). Are the Italian healthcare organizations using their websites to effectively inform people? Lucisano P, Piemontese ME (1988). Gulpease. Una formula per la predizione della difficoltà dei testi in lingua italiana.. NotReadable NotReadable NotReadable
- 5. In Italy, the websites are difficult to understand for people with a low educational level (data: Dec 2015). The healthcare organisations’ websites seem built on the healthcare organisations’ needs, rather than on characteristics (i.e. health literacy and education level) and needs of the potential users.
- 6. The management of the 13 Italian Regions decided that the online communication was as issue that they had and wanted to address. The Regions decided to monitor and evaluate these aspects within the Collaborative of the Italian Regions, by introducing specific indicators in the healthcare Performance Evaluation System they voluntarily adopted. Readability 2016 Readability 2015
- 7. These results impose the consideration of the need to provide access to good quality, but also comprehensible and readable, information on institutional and official websites. It is an institutional duty to communicate in a understandable way. Sabina De Rosis, PhD sabina.derosis@santannapisa.it Any Questions?
Editor's Notes
- The advent of the Internet and the availability of health information online has posed new challenges and opportunities to the healthcare sector. The amount of people who surf the Internet for health-related purposes is dramatically increasing. Actually, the ‘post-truth’ phenomenon had interested also the healthcare field, where the quality of the online information is really variable. In addition, the health literacy of people and their consequent capacity to correctly understand and therefore use health-related information is variable. The quality and usability of information provided by the healthcare organizations online appear very important, in order to avoid the risks of fake news as well as of a misunderstanding of information.
- The aim of this work is to describe if and how healthcare organizations of the Italian regional healthcare systems are communicating to people using their websites. 167 websites from 13 Italian Regions were analyzed on December 2016. We verified whatever online communication of Italian public hospitals and local healthcare authorities is readable and comprehensible for people with different level of education and different level of literacy, by using the Gulpease Index and the Italian Fundamental Vocabulary (IFV).
- The results show that, in Italy, the healthcare organisations’ online communication is still not structured by taking into consideration literacy and health literacy of people who may surf the Internet. The Gulpease Index (readability by education) shows that, in Italy, the healthcare organizations websites are readable without difficulties only by people with at least a high school diploma. No-one is readable for people with a low educational level. Also the analysis related to the IFV shows that the websites texts use a great amount of uncommon and difficult words. The study results have been recognized as important by the Regions considered into the analysis. For this reason, the Collaborative of the Italian Regions, coordinated by the MeS Laboratory of Sant’Anna School, decided to monitor and evaluate these aspects for two years, by introducing specific indicators in the healthcare Performance Evaluation System they adopted.
- These results impose an urgent consideration of some ethical issues, like as equal access to good quality but also comprehensible and readable information online. In the ‘post-truth’ era, it is important to consider the risks of less quality but more readable and comprehensible information available on other than the healthcare organisations’ websites. This suggests an urgent consideration of the health literacy of people, in addition to their information needs, in the healthcare institutions communication (off and online) for every purposes.