Are the websites of the designated cancer care hospitals made with the viewpoint of inhabitants and patients

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the information accessibility for the websites of twenty-one designated cancer care hospitals in Hokkaido. The web accessibility on basic policy published on the websites of twenty-one hospitals was investigated. The front pages of the website were analyzed using an evaluation tool, miChecker. The web accessibility was evaluated using four items (perception, operability, intelligibility and robustness) based on JIS X 8341-3：2010. The place and the content judged to have problems in each item was extracted and the proportion for each problem was calculated. Furthermore, the accessibility to two medical information (second opinion, operation and treatment results of cancer) in the websites of twenty-one hospitals was investigated by presence or absence of two information and route until information arrival. The result was that there were no hospitals which published the web accessibility basic policy on the website. For itemized evaluation, the evaluation of the perception and the operability for twenty-one websites was overall low, especially in the category on perception -“the achievement standard for non-text contents”- was approximately 70 percent. The operation and treatment results of cancer on the website had less information than second opinion, and needed extra time to access such information. Only four hospital websites had links to either of the two public medical information. It is suggested that most of the websites of twenty-one designated cancer care hospitals in Hokkaido have problems with information accessibility, and they do not offer web contents catering to the inhabitants' (especially the disabled and the aged) viewpoints.