What can you find online about Nursing-home? A website analysis on the Metropolitan City of Milan

Background Websites are among the most important communication distribution tools in everyday life. Does this apply to assisted living facility too? Can website information be used to assess quality of care? Can Public Health Administration use information provided on nursing home websites to define whether accreditation standards are met? The aim of this study was to assess websites of all the assisted living facility of the Metropolitan City of Milan (MCM) Agency for Health Protection (ATS) territory according to five dimensions: Description, Utility tools, eHealth literacy, Accreditation Standard and Usability, to answer the questions above. Methods A total of 141 websites for MSM ATS nursing homes were identified. A tailored check-list approach was used to investigate each of the 5 dimensions for all websites. For the dimension Description we analyse 20 items, for the Utility tools 14 items, for the eHealth literacy 12 items, for the Accreditation Standard 5 item and for Usability 6 item. A score was assigned to each dimension based on completeness of check-list items. Results Of the 160 nursing homes in the MSM ATS, 141 had a website (88%). No website was complete of all items. The average score was 34% the higher was 65% the lower 12%. The five dimensions description, utility tools, eHealth literacy, accreditation standard and usability scored 44%, 16%, 25%, 18% and 29% respectively. The Item more founded was Mission, 137 sites (97%), the least was Customer Satisfaction in 5 Sites (4%). We evaluated the Social Media presence: 81 facility (57%) have at least one social media. Conclusions Notwithstanding the Internet and Social Media are a powerful tool to promote eHealth Literacy are underused. Health promotion is shared more with the social media rather than the webpages. The webpage could become a powerful instrument to use by Administration to define whether accreditation standards are met but the contents on the sites are few and non-consistent. Key messages 11.500 people are assisted by our nursing homes, so part of the population can be reach through websites. We analyse them and discover that health promotion is spread by social media not by websites. We wanted to understand if Public Health Administration can evaluate accreditation standards through the website. We discover that standards can be evaluated on line rather than in-site assessment.