COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FREE HEALTH-RELATED ONLINE DATABASES BASED ON STUDENT KNOWLEDGE AND OPINION

In the growing field of pharmacy, drug information (DI) resources are frequently consulted by pharmacy students. Although students utilize the free online DI resources, there is limited information available about the usefulness of the sites. To compare six free common health-related online databases based on student assessment of the scope (presence or absence of answer) of the website and student opinion. A Drug Informatics course assigned a structured two-part survey for students to assess the online DI resources, where the first part examined the scope of the databases by locating 12 criteria points and the second part evaluated student opinions based on four themes. Data was analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics 21. Drugs.com was rated the highest in information available (scope mean, 8.54 ± 1.816; user opinion mean, 16.25 ± 3.198) and Drug Digest.org was rated the lowest amongst students (scope mean, 5.34 ± 1.858; user opinion mean, 13.03 ± 3.516). Issues in locating data from the website were commonly found with information on diseases, drugs, drug-food interactions, and alternative/complementary medicines. From these findings, the resources were arranged based on ease of use and scope so that users may make better choices.