• Michiaki Yamakage, Sei-Ichiro Ishiyama, Hiroki Yamamoto, Sohshi Iwasaki, and Akiyoshi Namiki.
• Department of Anesthesiology, Sapporo Medical University School of Medicine, Sapporo 060-8543.
• Masui. 2004 Sep 1; 53 (9): 1069-73.

BackgroundThe 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.MethodsWe investigated the quality of information available on the World Wide Web regarding departments/divisions of anesthesiology in 82 specific functioned hospitals in Japan.ResultsEighty-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.ConclusionsDepartments/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.

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