evaluation of the structure of websites of educational hospitals of fars province in 2016

introduction: in the recent years, evaluation of websites has become one of the main organizational instruments for the relationship between provision of services for customers and beneficiaries. despite the high costs for design and implementation of websites, less attention has been paid to evaluation of these websites’ function. this might be due to the lack of appropriate instruments and frameworks for evaluation of websites. in order to assess hospitals’ information, their websites have to be evaluated regarding webometric criteria so as to identify their strength and weaknesses. therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the websites of educational hospitals of fars province in 2016. method: in this descriptive study, the subjects included all the 43 active websites of educational hospitals of fars province; they were evaluated by three experts in health information technology. the study data were collected using a checklist whose validity had been confirmed in the previous studies. after all, the data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, spss 21 and excel 2013 software, and the results were presented through tables. results:the mean scores obtained from three evaluators showed that out of the 43 hospitals under investigation, 35 and 8 hospitals were ranked as good and moderate hospitals, respectively. in addition, the lowest score was related to interactive exchange of views (30.25%), while the highest scores were related to information objectivity (100%), information accuracy (100%), and non-textual views (100%). conclusion: the overall quality level of most of the hospital was relatively acceptable. but it is necessary that the hospitals improve their websites based on information updatedness, coverage of special addressees, navigation, efficiency and interactive exchange of views. the improvement in the latter criterion will help in reducing the number of daily referrals to the hospitals.