Robotic colorectal surgery: quality assessment of patient information available on the internet using webscraping

Abstract

The primary goal of this study is to assess current patient information available on the internet concerning robotic colorectal surgery. Acquiring this information will aid in patients understanding of robotic colorectal surgery. Data was acquired through a web-scraping algorithm. The algorithm used two Python packages: Beautiful Soup and Selenium. The long-chain keywords incorporated into Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines were ‘Da Vinci Colon-Rectal Surgery’, ‘Colorectal Robotic Surgery’ and ‘Robotic Bowel Surgery’. 207 websites resulted, were sorted and evaluated according to the ensuring quality information for patients (EQIP) score. Of the 207 websites visited, 49 belonged to the subgroup of hospital websites (23.6%), 46 to medical centers (22.2%), 45 to practitioners (21.7%), 42 to health care systems (20,2%), 11 to news services (5.3%), 7 to web portals (3.3%), 5 to industry (2.4%), and 2 to patient groups (0.9%). Only 52 of the 207 websites received a high rating. The quality of available information on the internet concerning robotic colorectal surgery is low. The majority of information was inaccurate. Medical facilities involved in robotic colorectal surgery, robotic bowel surgery and related robotic procedures should develop websites with credible information to guide patient decisions.

Keywords:

• Robotic colorectal surgery
• patient information
• webscraping
• EQIP

Institutional review board statement

Not applicable.

Informed consent statement

Not applicable.

Author contributions

Conceptualization A.T., V.O.; data collection L.B.; visualization V.O., S.T.-M.; writing—original draft S.T.-M., A.T.; Statistics: V.O. writing—review and editing O.B., M.D.H., A.T., P.C.C. authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Code availability statement

Access to the code can be granted upon request to the corresponding author.

Data availability statement

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no external funding.