Robotic Colorectal Surgery - Assessment of the Quality of Patient Information Available on the Internet using WebScraping

Abstract Background The primary goal of this study is to assess the current patient information available on the internet concerning robotic colorectal surgery. The study is a review, and acquiring this information is relevant to understanding the subject's current and future scope. Methods We acquired data for this study through a web-scraping algorithm. The algorithm used two Python packages: Beautiful Soup and Selenium. The long-chain keywords incorporated into the Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines for this study were "Da Vinci Colon-Rectal Surgery", “Colorectal Robotic Surgery” and “Robotic Bowel Surgery”. After sorting the 207 websites, 5 investigators evaluated the websites according to the Ensuring quality information for patients (EQIP) score. Results Of the 207 websites visited, 49 belonged to the subgroup of hospital websites (23.6%), 46 to Medical Centers (22.2%), 45 to Practitioners (21.7%), 42 to Health Care Systems (20,2%), 11 to News Services (5.3%), 7 to Web Portals (3.3%), 5 to the Industry (2.4%), and 2 to Patient Groups (0.9%). Conclusion The quality of the information available on the internet concerning robotic colorectal surgery is low since only 82 websites received a high rating. Most of the information on the different websites is inaccurate, consequently medical facilities involved in robotic colorectal surgery, robotic bowel surgery and related should develop credible websites to guide patient decisions.