ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the weakness of the internet as a resource for medical information. YouTube is a common source patients search, especially regarding surgeries. YouTube and the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) have collaborated to accredit videos from reputable sources to identify them as trustworthy resources. It remains undefined whether high quality resources are available to inform patients pending cytoreductive surgery and hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (CRS/HIPEC), In this study, YouTube search results for HIPEC are critically appraised for the quality of information and visual aids presented to patients seeking information online. METHOD(S): The first 100 YouTube search results for HIPEC less than 10 minutes long in English with audio and/or text were transcribed. The Flesch-Kincaid score defined the reading grade level. High content quality videos were accredited by the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) or mentioned the standard components necessary for a surgical consent. The Anderson-Lau score is a composite of these criteria ranging from 0-8. The simplicity of videos for patient education was graded from poor to high quality by the DISCERN tool. The quality of audiovisual aids was evaluated using the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool (PEMAT) which is graded from 0-100%. RESULT(S): A total of 96 videos met the inclusion criteria. The threshold of 100 videos was not reached because the remaining videos were all over 10 min or not in English. The median number of views was 798. The most common video publishers were Academic or Research Centers (37.5%) and News or Media Outlets (30.2%). The most common intended audiences were Patients (73%) and Physicians (16.7%). Over half of the videos (53.1%) did not have NAM accreditation. The median Anderson-Lau, PEMAT understandability and DISCERN scores were 2, 56.4%, and Poor respectively. Only 1 video scored as high quality by DISCERN metrics. Only 11.5% of the videos were at a 6-8th grade reading level, which is considered the reading level for average Americans. Higher Anderson-Lau, PEMAT, or DISCERN scores were not associated with NAM accreditation. CONCLUSION(S): CRS/HIPEC is a treatment option for advanced metastatic cancers. Using the Anderson-Lau, DISCERN, and PEMAT scores, most internet videos are poor quality regardless of NAM accreditation. These three tools could be used in a concerted effort to design higher quality resources about CRS/HIPEC to better educate patients on such a consequential operation.