Are Health Videos from Hospitals, Health Organizations, and Active Users Available to Health Consumers? An Analysis of Diabetes Health Video Ranking in YouTube.

Carlos Fernandez-Llatas,Jose-Enrique Borras-Morell,Randi Karlsen,Vicente Traver,Antonio Martinez-Millana

doi:10.1155/2017/8194940

Abstract

Health consumers are increasingly using the Internet to search for health information. The existence of overloaded, inaccurate, obsolete, or simply incorrect health information available on the Internet is a serious obstacle for finding relevant and good-quality data that actually helps patients. Search engines of multimedia Internet platforms are thought to help users to find relevant information according to their search. But, is the information recovered by those search engines from quality sources? Is the health information uploaded from reliable sources, such as hospitals and health organizations, easily available to patients? The availability of videos is directly related to the ranking position in YouTube search. The higher the ranking of the information is, the more accessible it is. The aim of this study is to analyze the ranking evolution of diabetes health videos on YouTube in order to discover how videos from reliable channels, such as hospitals and health organizations, are evolving in the ranking. The analysis was done by tracking the ranking of 2372 videos on a daily basis during a 30-day period using 20 diabetes-related queries. Our conclusions are that the current YouTube algorithm favors the presence of reliable videos in upper rank positions in diabetes-related searches.

Highlights

The Internet is fast becoming one of the most common sources for health information, and studies show that people use the Internet to obtain information concerning health [1, 2]
The quantity of videos uploaded daily on YouTube is so huge that it is possible that these educational videos might not be accessible to users. With this problem in mind, the research question presented in this paper is the following: Are the diabetes-related health videos on YouTube posted by hospitals, health organizations, and active users available to health consumers?
Health information on the Internet comes from different sources, from private persons reporting on personal experiences with disease, and from hospitals, health organizations, governments, educational institutions, and profitmaking organizations

Summary

Introduction

The Internet is fast becoming one of the most common sources for health information, and studies show that people use the Internet to obtain information concerning health [1, 2]. Too many websites include inaccurate, missing, obsolete, incorrect, biased, or misleading instructions that make it difficult for users to distinguish between trustworthy and specious information [9, 10] These inaccuracies provide erroneous information to patients causing misunderstandings [10, 11] affecting themselves and other patients [12] and can lead to an unhealthy lifestyle, damaging the health of unconscious users, as in the case of anorexia [13], or sabotaging important prevention campaigns directed. Users are more likely to trust health information published or authorised by physicians or major health institutions [22,23,24] versus information provided by other sources. The literature shows that the search for adequate health videos for patient education in YouTube is highly unpredictable in terms of health quality

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