[Assessment of the quality of information on departments/divisions of anesthesiology available on the World Wide Web].

Background: The quality of health information available in the World Wide Web is an important issue, but no review of the quality of such information has been performed.
Methods: We investigated the quality of information available on the World Wide Web regarding departments/divisions of anesthesiology in 82 specific functioned hospitals in Japan.
Results: Eighty-eight percent of the hospitals have their own web site for anesthesiology. Although only general clinical information was available on 64-71% of the web sites, detailed information on clinical results and members having diploma of the board was available on 11-26% of the sites. Regarding education, only 4% of the sites provided information on contents of lectures, whereas 75% of the sites have pages for medical students.
Conclusions: Departments/divisions of anesthesiology, especially in specific functioned hospitals, should recognize an important role of web pages for medical consumers (= e-patient) and renew their web sites appropriately and opportunely.