Abstract
Background: The public has voiced concerns regarding the of hospital care. Although hospitals are committing increasing resources toward improving safety, they have not yet communicated their efforts in a manner that has restored public confidence. Hospitals have adopted the Internet to provide health care information and market their service excellence, but it is not clear to what degree hospitals are using the Internet to provide information about their programs. Methods: We determined the amount of information on and service excellence posted on hospital Internet sites by selecting a random sample of 250 US academic and community hospitals drawn from the American Hospital Directory and stratified by region. Web page content was scored using a predefined list of words and content items. Results: Only 26% of hospitals posted content items related to somewhere on their Web sites, and 28% posted a patients' bill of rights with other content items posted on less than 8% of sites. Less than one half of sites mentioned the term patient safety with other terms posted on less than 15% of sites. Academic as compared with community hospitals provided more content. The surveyed service excellence terms were found on 22% to 82% of sites. Conclusions: Although hospitals commonly use the Internet to provide public information on service excellence, few describe their patient-safety programs. Discussions are needed regarding how hospitals can most appropriately communicate the comprehensiveness of their programs.
Published Version
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