Quality of consumer drug information provided by four Web sites

The quality of drug-specific information available to consumers on the Internet was studied. The 30 most commonly dispensed prescription drugs were selected to represent those medications for which consumers would be seeking information. A Web page evaluation form was developed to objectively evaluate each site in terms of sponsors, references, recency of updates, ease of use, overall organization, and other characteristics. A second form was developed to qualitatively and quantitatively assess the drug information provided by the sites. Four Internet sites, MedicineNet, RxList, Drug InfoNet, and thriveonline, were evaluated. Authors, contributors, and references were identified for three of the sites. All sites had disclaimers advising patients to seek the advice of a health care professional, all indexed drug information by both brand name and generic name, and all were well organized. Only RxList and MedicineNet contained information on all the drugs evaluated. For the drugs documented, RxList, MedicineNet, Drug InfoNet, and thriveonline contained 84%, 60%, 87%, and 72% of the 22 variables assessed, respectively. The accuracy of the information provided was greater than 98% for all the sites. Only two of four Internet sites containing consumer drug information included all the prescription drugs being evaluated. Most but not all of the information on the four sites was accurate.