Assessment of hospitals' websites in Portugal.

Technological advances have highly facilitated the accession of health-related information. As the public search on hospital websites for information and services is increasing, hospitals need to upgrade their websites to meet the high standards and demands of health-care consumers. Today, many hospital websites use a patient-centric approach to promote engagement and encourage interaction for better health-related decision making. However, little is known about the current state of hospital websites in Portugal. This study aims to assess hospital websites in Portugal and offer improvement insights. In this paper, the websites of 132 selected hospitals were thoroughly examined and assessed according to a predefined list of indicators and sub indicators, based on four criteria: technology, content, services and community interaction, defined in the Health Sector Website Assessment Index (HSWAI) instrument. Most of the websites scored satisfactorily in the technology criterion, performed fairly well in providing fundamental content, but showed shortcomings in quality metrics data and online patient services, and most of them fell short in community interaction elements. Overall, the results show that each hospital website must be improved in specific features in order to become effective and efficient. Several of the identified assessment elements (indicators/sub indicators) fall under Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3, United Nations health-focused goal, and could be used by governments to assess their progress toward achieving that specific goal. Therefore, this study not only provides a comprehensive and systematic approach that quantitatively measures hospital websites' overall performance, but also contributes to practical applications in terms of worthwhile recommendations for a website that meets patient's demands and hospital's operational needs.

Developing health sector websites assessment instrument: Challenges and pitfalls.

Electronic health services have been received with a tremendous interest world over. Patients consider hospital websites as highly important sources for health information and services. As a number of health institutes are carrying out projects to improve their websites, the need to design proper assessment means to measure whether they have achieved or are going to achieve their targets arises. Proper assessment of these websites gives us crucial information on the kind of changes needed to make them successful. To satisfy this need, an instrument called Health Sector Website Assessment Index (HSWAI) was developed, integrating the assessment of content, services, community interaction and technology features criteria, under a multi-indicator approach. Many of the considered indicators could be used to monitor progress towards the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3, which is the United Nations health-focused goal. The purpose of this study is to highlight the challenges of developing and applying the assessment instrument for health institute websites. The paper covers key issues and challenges in conceiving, designing, developing, refining and validating HSWAI, and finally in applying it to a set of Portuguese health institutes. The results of this study could provide several insights and recommendations to e-Government assessment researchers and practitioners at the national and agency levels on the development of relative e-Government assessment tools. Studies such as the current one, apart from presenting applied solutions and relative lessons learned, are valuable to the conceptualization and application of present and future e-Government assessment initiatives, regardless of the sector where the effort occurs.