Assessing the Quality of Patient Information for Vestibular Schwannoma on the Open Source Video Sharing Platform YouTube

Background: Patients frequently use the internet to gain information and make decisions about their health conditions. This work aims to assess the quality of information about Vestibular Schwannoma on a popular video sharing platform, YouTube (Alphabet Inc.). Objectives: To assess quality of the most popular vestibular schwannoma videos using recognized scoring systems and whether video quality metrics correlated with video popularity based on metadata analysis. Setting: Public domain. Study Design: Cross-sectional Study Methods: The YouTube website was systematically searched on separate days with a formal search strategy to identify videos relevant to vestibular schwannoma. Each video was viewed and scored by three independent assessors, using scores for quality and disease specific accuracy. Popularity metrics were analyzed and compared to video quality. Patient surveys were conducted to further assess their perspectives of the included videos. Results: A total of 23 YouTube videos were included. In terms of Essential and Ideal Video Completeness Criteria, the mean scores ranged from 4.8 to 5.0 (out of 12), indicating moderate video quality. The average DISCERN score ranged from 30.0 to 36.7, indicating lower reliability. The mean JAMA scores ranged from 1.96 to 2.48, indicating average quality. Based on metrics including DISCERN and JAMA instruments, the information in the YouTube videos were of low to average quality and reliability. Rater scoring was reliable. Viewer engagement correlated poorly with video quality except for JAMA metrics. Conclusion: Video quality on YouTube with respect to Vestibular Schwannoma is of low to average quality. Viewer engagement and popularity correlated poorly with video quality. Clinicians should direct their patients to high quality videos and should consider uploading their own high-quality videos.