Background:
“Hospitalist” is a relatively new and evolving specialty field within modern medicine, dedicated to the delivery of comprehensive medical care to hospitalized patients. Unfortunately, few primary care and emergency department physicians inform patients about hospitalist coverage during their hospitalization. This knowledge gap can impede the therapeutic relationship and in turn negatively affect the patient’s outcome and liability.
YouTubeTM is one of the most accessed websites used to view information. The video-based forum offers access to a gamut of self-produced and professionally made clips that have been uploaded and shared by individuals and groups. We sought to determine the adequacy of YouTubeTM as an effective means to define and depict the role of hospitalists.
Methods:
YouTubeTM was searched on 11/17/2014 using the following search words: “Hospitalist,” “Hospitalist definition,” “What is the role of a hospitalist,” “Define hospitalist” and “Who is a hospitalist.” Only videos found in the first 10 pages of each search were included. Non-English, non-educational and non-relevant videos were excluded. The remaining videos were categorized according to uploader type, video category and medical specialty. A novel 7 points scoring tool was created by the authors based on the society of hospital medicine definition of a hospitalist. The videos were evaluated by three independent reviewers and were classified into high, intermediate and low quality in defining hospitalists and their roles based on the average score. An Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) was used to assess reviewers’ performance.
Results:
A total of 102 videos out of 855 were identified as relevant and included in the analysis. Videos were categorized by the source of uploader into: non-academic institution (n=57, 55.9%), news reports (n= 25, 24.5%), academic institutions (n=9, 8.8%), personal (n=6, 5.9%), health advertisements (n=4, 3.9%) and others (n=1, 1.0%). The mean score for all videos was 3.11 (SD 1.19). The highest mean score was for videos uploaded by academic institutions 3.37 (SD 0.73). The number of videos from all categories that were classified high quality were 6, intermediate quality 53 and low quality 42 videos, with 82% of the videos scoring an average of 4 or less. The ICC score was 0.809.
Conclusions:
This study illustrates that most videos found in the search of a hospitalist definition are non-relevant and incomplete in fulfilling the purpose. It also indicates the inadequacy of using YouTubeTM as a tool to define the role of hospitalists without some guidance to direct search engines toward the higher quality videos. Leading medical organizations and academic institutions might consider producing and uploading quality videos to YouTubeTM to help patients and their families better understand the roles and definition of the hospitalist.