[Evaluation of Spanish websites useful for the primary care physicians]

To assess the usefulness of medical websites in spanish for the primary care physicians using quality criteria chosen by themselves.

Observational, descriptive, cross-sectional study.

Internet.

The search was performed in Google and Yahoo using as key words the name of Spanish National Health Service medical specialities, primary care and synonyms. The first one hundred links in spanish for every keyword were included in the study.

paysites, commercial sites, non-clinical content, link sites, patient oriented sites and on-line editions of printed issues.

A survey was carried out asking the primary care physicians of area IV in Asturias which were the most important criteria that a medical website should fulfil. The results of this survey were used to make an assessment questionnaire. Every site was analysed randomizedly by two researchers and was classified as excelent, good, medium or bad.

2.095 medical websites in spanish were found, being repeated 1.218 (58.14%). From the 877 analysed websites, 597 (68.07%) were excluded. The Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) was 0.73 (95% CI, 0.66%-0.785%). 5 websites (1.8%) were rated as excelent and the 77.2% as medium or bad. The sites with better ratings were those oriented to the primary care professionals.

The most websites were rated as medium or bad. The evaluation questionnaire is useful for futures studies.