Website Usability of American Anesthesiology Residency Programs (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Due to the changes brought by the coronavirus pandemic on medical education, many students will have limited in person exposure to Anesthesiology programs and will rely on information gleaned digitally. Consequently, program websites used to provide information will become crucial in helping students decide where and how to apply in the future. OBJECTIVE The primary goals of this study were to: 1) Identify United States anesthesiology residency programs and their websites; 2) Objectively analyze anesthesiology residency websites employing a formally published usability scoring system; 3) Identify positive and negative trends to offer areas of improvement amongst anesthesiology residency websites. METHODS We included 114 United States anesthesiology residency program websites in our sample. Website usability was separated into four distinct categories: Accessibility, Marketing, Content Quality, and Technology. Each website was then analyzed and scored based on components highlighted within the four categories. The factors were then graded using a percentage system to create a comprehensive score for each program. RESULTS The highest scoring category was Content Quality (mean 4.7, std +/- 2.48, SE 0.23). The lowest scoring category was Technology (mean 0.9, std +/- 0.38, SE 0.04). CONCLUSIONS Through the framework of healthcare website usability, multiple anesthesiology residency programs were analyzed and scored in the areas of Accessibility, Marketing, Content Quality, and Technology. We recommend that anesthesiology programs should improve website usability to increase the ease by which applicants collect information about their programs. Proposed solutions include improving Technology by decreasing error pages on websites, migrating away from using in-line cascading style sheets (CSS), and increasing web page loading speeds.