THURSDAY, July 12, 2001 (HealthDayNews) -- When you search the Web for medical information about your child's health, you'll need a high school diploma to understand what you find.
A new study shows most sites on children's health are written at a 12th-grade level, meaning people with less education can't use the information, say the researchers. Many experts think the information should be written at an 8th-grade reading level.
However, at least one Internet health expert says people seeking medical information on the Web probably are more educated and need more sophisticated information.
"What we found, across the board, was that reading levels were too high -- roughly at a 12th-grade level -- and it did not matter whether we looked at Web sites created by different authors or different institutions," says study author Dr. Donna D'Alessandro, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Iowa. "To give you a quick example, it did not matter if the author was a physician or a nurse, the reading level was still too high."
D'Alessandro and her colleagues used computer programs and what she called "hand-calculation formulas" to assess the reading levels of 89 pediatric Web sites.
"We used GeneralPediatrics.com (a site she developed with a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant) to locate other pediatric Web sites," she says.
"GeneralPediatrics.com is actually a digital library, which links to about 500 pediatric Web sites currently," D'Alessandro says. "I'm very interested in getting medical information into the hands of health-care providers when they need to make a decision about care, and I'm also interested in the same thing for patients."
Researchers used four computer programs to count the number of words, the number of syllables in the words and the number of sentences.
Three of the four programs rated all sites at a 12th-grade reading level, D'Alessandro says. The fourth found all the sites were below an 8th-grade reading level, "but this fourth program is known to grade readability at a lower level -- about three grades lower," D'Alessandro says.
The findings appear in the July issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.
About 22.3 million Americans sought medical information online as of December 1998, making health information the sixth most popular type of Web information, reports the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Twenty-nine percent of all Americans looked to the Internet for medical information, and almost 70 percent of people searching for health-care information on the Web do so before visiting a doctor's office, the FTC says.
John Mack, of the Internet Healthcare Coalition, says the study should have compared print information about children's health with the Internet material before judging the Web sites. The coalition is a non-profit group that monitors health-care information on the Internet.
"The only good stuff I've seen on medical information at an 8th grade or lower level, stuff that's culturally sensitive, were government sites like the National Institutes of Health," he says. "Unlike consumer sites, those sites have to conform to federal mandates."
Mack says he's not sure that Internet information should be dumbed down.
"Who are those sites targeting?" he asks. "If they are targeting clinicians, they should be writing at the level of their audience. I suspect on the Internet that the general populations using the tool have a higher education level, which has been pointed out by all the statistics I've seen."
D'Alessandro says she has a few recommendations for medical Web site developers: "First, both readers and writers need to be aware that there is a problem, especially writers. And people who develop Web sites need to know that there are computer programs available in a lot of spell-check programs. They can estimate grade levels for you. I suggest that Web site publishers and writers use these formulas to get a ballpark idea of what grade they're writing at."
But Mack says, "It often depends on the medical condition. People looking for information on chronic conditions, for instance, are very educated about those conditions, from my experience. That education level is often at a higher level than some of the general practitioners out there."
"I wouldn't think of writing too far down for them. Those readers appreciate a higher level of information," Mack says.
What To Do: For more reviews of pediatric Web sites, visit the American Academy of Pediatrics or PedInfo.
