The Quality of Evidence of and Engagement With Video Medical Claims

Are medical claims in health care professional–created online videos supported by strong scientific evidence, and are evidence levels associated with engagement metrics or traditional video quality assessment tools?In this quality improvement study of 309 video claims, 62% of claims relied on very little or no evidence, while less than 20% were supported by high-quality evidence. Grade D videos (ie, those with very low or no certainty of evidence) were associated with a 35% higher view count than grade A videos (ie, those with very high certainty of evidence), and traditional quality tools showed weak correlations with evidence levels, thus failing to detect important qualitative differences.These findings suggest that to maintain scientific integrity in digital health communication, evidence-based content standards and improved science communication training for health care professionals are needed.

Corresponding Author: EunKyo Kang, MD, National Cancer Control Institute, National Cancer Center, 323 Ilsan-ro, Ilsandong-gu, Goyang-si, Gyeonggi-do, 10408, Korea (ekherb@ncc.re.kr).

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