CHICAGO – Americans turning to a hospital website for tips on how to quit smoking have only roughly a 50-50 chance of finding help, a study suggests.
In the study, the percentage of hospitals with smoking cessation information easily available on their website was 48% in 2012, up from 28% in 2000. Two analyses were of the same 50 randomly selected U.S. hospitals, with two websites going offline in the interim.
Patrice Wendling/IMNG Medical Media
Dr. John T. Denny
"This small sample shows there’s a trend toward improvement in hospitals providing information on their websites, with still some opportunity for improvement," Dr. John T. Denny said at the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians.
Session comoderator Dr. Mary Beth Scholand put it more succinctly, saying, "Why there isn’t something there really boggles the mind." Dr. Scholand is director of the interstitial lung disease clinic at University of Utah Health Care in St. Lake City.
The number of consumers visiting the Internet to gather health information has increased dramatically over the last decade, with many searching hospital sites specifically for smoking cessation information and services, said Dr. Denny, who is with the Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J.
A recent survey reported that 47% of 1,128 adult smokers in England were interested in trying an Internet site or mobile app to quit smoking, though only 0.3% had done so within the past year (J. Med. Internet Res. 2013;15:e50 [doi: 10.2196/jmir.2342]). Interested smokers were younger, more cigarette dependent, had more recent quit attempts, and were more likely to have handheld computer access.
U.S. smokers using the Internet in an analysis of the 2003 Health Information National Trends Survey were also younger and had a higher income, fewer barriers to health care, and a greater interest in quitting than smokers not on the Internet (Nicotine Tob. Res. 2006;8 Suppl 1:S77-85), Dr. Denny observed.
"This is an opportunity for hospitals to actually recruit those folks into their hospital network" at a young age and maintain them as lifelong patients, he said, adding that this "stickiness" or loyalty has already been demonstrated with hospital ob.gyn. services.
Smokers appear to be discerning, however, when it comes to the quality of health information available on the Internet. When 706 current and former smokers in the United States rated 133 different smoking cessation websites, two of the three most frequently visited sites were owned by tobacco companies. These sites were not perceived as helpful, while the nonprofit smokefree.gov and anti-smoking.org received above-average marks (Nicotine Tob. Res. 2006;8 Suppl 1:S27-34).
Dr. Denny and his colleagues did not examine why the hospitals in their analysis failed to provide online resources, although the cost to do so is nominal.
"One feature that’s very, very cost effective is just to add a link to something like QuitNet.com or the American Lung Association," he said.
Dr. Denny and his coauthors reported having no financial disclosures.