BACKGROUND
Websites of hospitals and clinics play a critical role in delivering important clinical information between medical providers and patients. However, there have been few studies on its adoption.
OBJECTIVE
The objective of this study is to investigate the factors associated with the operation status of websites of medical facilities, defined by whether the facility has a website.
METHODS
A cross-sectional study design using secondary data was employed to investigate 1,519 hospitals (small hospitals with 30–100 beds), 33,043 medical clinics, and 18,240 dental clinics as of 2020. The study used the health insurance administrative data. The main outcome variable was the operation status of the website and independent variables were the location of study subjects, size of facilities, and advanced diagnostics medical equipment. The study used a logistic regression using SAS 9.4 version.
RESULTS
The percentage of small hospitals, clinics, and dental clinics with websites was 26.4%, 9.0%, and 6.6%, respectively. Several factors were significantly associated with running the websites: the years of operation (odds ratio [OR] 1.081,95% CI 1.064-1.098, P<.0001), number of physicians (OR 1.025; 95% CI 1.002-1.048, P=.030), and having a subway station near the hospital (OR 2.816; 95% CI 2.004-3.957, P<0.0001). The operation of the websites was related with the location of the facility, years of operation, number of physicians or dentists, having a subway station, and the number of clinics or dental clinics within the local areas in both clinics and dental clinics (P<.005).
CONCLUSIONS
This study showed that the proportion of small hospitals with websites was much higher than that of medical and dental clinics. However, the overall proportion was still low. Several facility-related and environmental factors were critically associated with website operations, but more factors affected small clinics and dental clinics.