What Is Youtube Telling Us About Outpatient Vascular Surgery Treatment Centers?
Pushpak Pondugula, Kedar Lavingia, MD, Michael F. Amendola, MD.
VA Medical Center/VCU Health System, Richmond, VA, USA.
OBJECTIVES: Outpatient vascular surgery treatment centers (OVT) can offer a variety of services from simple patient exams to advanced open and endovascular treatments. OVTs are increasingly being used to treat vascular disease especially in private practice institutions. We sought to better understand the online content as presented by YouTube for OVTs.METHODS: YouTube was examined in December 2019 for the top 100 relevant videos from the search “vascular surgery outpatient centers”. Videos with >1500 vides were considered high frequency videos (HFV) all others considered low frequency videos (LFV). All videos were examined for subject type, time of creation and total views. Videos were examined by a single reviewer (PP) to determine the following in the content: 1. mention a procedure or disease? 2. mention the ease of treating? 3. discuss the location on the body of the procedure? and 4. discuss cost of the treatment? Who is the video intended for (Patient, Provider, or Other) and type of institution (Private or Academic) were also collected. T-test* and Fishers exact testing** were utilized.RESULTS: Comparing HFV versus LFV to each other (Table). There was no significant difference in the key content between the groups. The cost of the procedures in OVTs were mentioned in 4.1% vs. 1.3% (p=0.42**) of the HFV and LFV respectively.CONCLUSIONS: In examining the HFV to LFV OVTs videos on YouTube we find similar durations, total views and time since creation. There were no significant differences in terms of content presented with cost information mentioned less than five percent of the time regardless of video frequency. Interestingly, despite OVTs commonly being utilized by private practice institutions, academic videos represented the majority of the HFV found. These data should encourage development of further online content by non-academic institutions to characterizes OVTs that are common utilized for the treatment of vascular disease. 
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